


fill me up (with the glorious words you say)

by awakeanddreaming, bucketofrice (epigraphs)



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, F/M, Podcasting, burglars and ghosts and peas oh my!, wifi woes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2020-02-26
Packaged: 2020-06-27 10:35:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 49,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19789108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awakeanddreaming/pseuds/awakeanddreaming, https://archiveofourown.org/users/epigraphs/pseuds/bucketofrice
Summary: Scott accidentally stole his neighbour's wifi. They noticed. Now, he's trying to think of the perfect, short-but-hopefully-sweet thing to name his now-nameless network to say "sorry."Sorry My WIFI Crapped Out And The Leafs Were Onis accurate but seems kind of douchey,You Have Great Streaming Speeds What’s Your Planis downright offensive andIt’s Not My Fault You Didn’t Lock Itis just asking for trouble. Eventually, Scott settles onSorry My Thumb Slipped Won’t Happen Againand presses enter, hoping that whoever is on the other side of the connection will accept his apology.





	1. the (failed) connection

**Author's Note:**

> There's a list floating around Tumblr of AU ideas, and one of them had two strangers communicating via wifi network names. Somehow, it sparked our interest, and then we sent stuff back and forth and realized we'd basically written a scene from a fic. Then, we actually decided to make it one. This is the result.
> 
> Many thanks to the lovely humans of the Guild for supporting our shenanigans, and for reading this over. Title is "Faster" by Sofi de la Torre.
> 
> (bucketofrice takes the blame for any and all hockey mistakes, awakeanddreaming is at fault for any recording studio inaccuracies)

The tension in the rink is electric. Marner has the assist, Matthews takes over the play, they’re racing across the ice and the puck is sailing straight to the net and the Leafs are going to score in three, two—

_ Shit. _

Scott’s wifi has picked the perfect time to go out on him. He lets out a curse and presses the little button to reconnect to the network and scowls when it doesn’t work. Then he clicks it again. And again. And again. Still no dice. 

After the third  _ failed to connect to network _ Scott is about to give up on the idea of streaming the game and resign himself to opening his Twitter app and watching the play-by-play at work the next day. But then he notices it — an open network with a shockingly strong signal. It’s just listed as Bell1109. He clicks and connects almost instantly. He assumes it’s probably Mrs. Johnson down the hall; grandparents like her can never seem to figure out how to lock their networks.

He knows it’s probably a dick move to steal her internet, but he reckons she’s never using it anyway (and if she is, what could she possibly be using her admittedly stellar bandwidth for except knitting patterns and Netflix for baking shows) and just a few minutes won’t hurt. Sure enough, the stream connects and the game roars to life again, just as the puck misses the net by half an inch.

“God damn it,” Scott shouts, punching the seat of his sofa with a fist. So much for free wifi.

Scott has surprisingly good bandwidth for the next few days, and he doesn’t think much of it when his websites load just a little bit faster and the Leafs stream is just a little bit crisper. In fact, he doesn’t really think about his phone at all until three days later. 

He’s in the break room after a long morning with an athlete facing the decision between a risky surgery or retirement. To take his mind off how emotionally drained he feels, he’s recounting a spectacular save his brother made when they played a pickup game with some old high school buddies over the weekend. 

“It was insane,” he says, his voice rising in volume as he gets more and more excited. “I have no idea how he moved so fast with all that old equipment on!” 

Chiddy is nodding along to his story over his mug of coffee and stack of client notes. “I have a feeling this is going to be one of those things that is nowhere near as amazing as you remember it being,” he says, shaking his head.

“Man, you have no idea. It was probably better. Charlie literally flew, had to have been five feet, landed right on the guy,” Scott says his hand hitting the table harder than he intended. “They both ended up with stitches, but no one scored.” 

“Sure,” Chiddy says with a small smile, one that means he knows he’s getting under Scott’s skin by not engaging, before turning back to his notes. 

Scott thinks maybe if he acts it out, really gets into it with the gesticulating, then Chiddy will understand just how impressive it had been. He’s just starting the story over again, this time with actions, when he knocks over his cup of hot coffee with his elbow — he’s waving a little bit much, maybe, but sue him for expressing his emotions like a  _ man _ — and splashes it all over the screen of his phone.

_ Fuck. _

He yanks it from the table, lets out a series of colourful curse words and tries to avoid Chiddy’s gaze at all costs, because he knows his best friend and colleague is losing it across the table from him and he does  _ not _ need this right now. Instead, he gingerly wipes off the remaining coffee and powers down his phone, just to be safe, and wonders idly if he has rice in his apartment so he can put it in a bag when he gets home in a few hours’ time. 

He knows the office doesn’t have any and neither does the rink, and he really can’t be bothered to run to a grocery store right now to buy some. His phone will have to wait, because his next client can’t. Scott quickly wipes up the coffee and jabs Chiddy in the shoulder in an effort to get him to wipe the shit-eating grin off his face. 

Duty calls.

* * *

“God damn it,” Tessa hears through the wall of her kitchen as she pads towards her studio, an extra-large mug of coffee clasped between her hands. It’s swiftly followed by another string of curses that she cuts off by closing the door. The thick weather-stripping she added to the bottom to seal the gap pulls along the carpet, and as soon as the door shuts, her world is blissfully silent. 

The soundproofing here isn’t as good as her last place, but when she bought the condo she had extra insulation put in all four walls of the spare bedroom, the expensive foam stuff that provides a sound barrier. She also had a thick, plush carpet with an extra layer of padding installed — she’s pretty sure she could quite comfortably curl up on the floor and go to sleep here. Add that to the soundproofing she managed to salvage from her last place and all her years of accumulated equipment, and she’s been able to set up a pretty impressive recording studio in her spare room. 

Now that she’s blocked out the sounds of her neighbour, Tessa settles in at her desk. 

She’s already spent the better part of yesterday and this morning quarantined in this little room, listening and editing, splicing together clips and making sure all her transitions are smooth. All she needs to do now is record her own intro and give the finished episode one last listen before uploading it for her editor, who’ll send it back for edits before it makes it to the CBC Radio main page and she gets to upload the link to her own site. 

She’s already posted a promotional video — a clip she filmed of her and Guillaume walking through the streets of downtown to get coffee while reminiscing over Tessa’s brief time at the ballet — to her Instagram, Twitter and personal site, which means she’s actually ahead of schedule for her deadline. 

She takes a long sip of her coffee, keeping it close to her face after she’s done just to breathe in the aroma and the warmth, before pulling up her microphone. She goes over her notes one last time before turning it on and hitting  _ record. _

“This week on Virtuous Pursuits, I had the chance to have a one on one with someone very dear to my heart,” Tessa says into the microphone on the desk in front of her, making sure she speaks clearly and pauses in all the right places. “This artist was an inspiration to me when I joined the National Ballet and a cheerleader during my journey to radio and journalism when my dreams of being a ballerina were cut short by injury. Guillaume Côté, who became a principal for the National Ballet of Canada in 2004 and is known for his musicality and dramatizations, joins me to talk about his transition into choreography and what it means to take a step back from performing and how he balances family life with work.”

She plays it back from her computer at a few different volumes to make sure everything sounds how it should, checking that she hasn’t spoken too quickly, or mumbled words, that her voice is clear but also natural and not robotic. Once she’s satisfied, she takes her time to compile the whole episode together. One last listen and she gets ready to upload it to the editing chain. Except her upload speed is nowhere near where it should be. She watches it sit at  _ 30% complete  _ for five minutes. 

This can’t be right? She literally just got a brand-new router three days ago when she noticed her wifi signal wasn’t as strong as it should be. The geek squad guy from BestBuy told her it was top-of-the-line so her signal should be strong; in fact, her signal should probably still be strong three apartments over. The modem is also direct from Bell and she’s paying for their premium internet package. It’s one of the requirements for her to be able to run her podcast herself — though it’s still licensed and distributed through the CBC — rather than having it produced out of the CBC studios where she knows she’d have far less creative control. 

Point is, her internet should  _ not  _ be slow. If anything, she thought download speeds of 600mbps and upload speeds of 30mbps were overkill. Sighing, she takes a post-it off her stack and makes a note to call Bell later in the week if it doesn’t improve, just as the upload hits  _ 75% complete. _

It’s not until a few days later, when Tessa is to publish a video she took at a rehearsal for the National Ballet (she was following around Guillaume and talking to some of the young dancers about the struggles they’ve faced to reach the pinnacle of their discipline) that she has trouble with her internet again. 

After a less than helpful phone call with Bell, where Tessa is transferred five different times, put on hold for exactly 47 minutes, and finally told there is absolutely nothing wrong with her internet, she wants to lock herself in her soundproof room and yell for every minute she’s wasted.

“Is your network locked?” asks Barb, the manager she was finally connected with. 

“Of course it is—” Tessa starts, immediately clicking on her network connections, and  _ oh fuck.  _ She forgot to reset her network name and password when she got the new router. She’d meant to do it, but had gotten so caught up in editing, followed by a downward spiral of dance videos, that she’d entirely forgotten. 

After apologizing to Barb for the inconvenience, Tessa starts the process of setting up a new password, realizing someone must have been using her internet and draining her bandwidth. Really, who doesn’t have internet these days? It must be a teenager, she thinks, grounded and locked out of their parents’ wifi. It’s still annoying. 

As she’s renaming the network, Tessa angrily types _Get Your Own Damn Internet!_ into the name box before immediately deleting it. She’s mad, sure, but she’s still relatively new to the building and doesn’t really want to piss off any of her neighbours. What she does want is for whoever her internet thief is to know that she’s not impressed. She deliberates before typing _You Slowed My Bandwidth I Need That For Work_ and hitting the enter key with a huff. She hopes it sounds annoyed enough without coming off as angry or rude. Though, she thinks, it _was_ pretty rude to steal her internet in the first place. 

Just as Tessa clicks _Change network name,_ she notices the pink post-it stuck to the corner of her laptop with _Email scottmoir@teamcanada.ca_ _to set up interview_ written in her own messy cursive. 

She’s already feeling a headache coming on from dealing with this internet fiasco but she needs to start on her next episode soon so this interview really can’t wait. Before she logs off for the day, she opens her email and writes a quick message to her potential next interviewee. He’s a contact she was set up with through her friend Marie-France, a former skater and a Team Canada correspondent for the CBC. 

**From:** tessa.virtue@cbc.ca

**To:** scottmoir@teamcanada.ca

_ Hi Scott,  _

_ This is Tessa from Virtuous Pursuits at CBC Radio; Marie-France Dubreuil has let me know about all the work that you’ve done in sports psychology and your unique approach as a mental prep coach for Team Canada athletes. I would love the opportunity to interview you to discuss how you help high performance athletes prepare for the Olympics and the work you’ve been doing to help them transition to a post-Olympic life.  _

_ Please let me know if and when you’d be available to speak.  _

_ I’ve attached some links to a few of my previous episodes and some articles I’ve written both for MacLean’s and The Walrus.  _

_ Best,  _

_ Tessa Virtue _

* * *

That night, when Scott finally gets home, the rice is long-forgotten and he tries to turn his phone on again anyway. He squeezes his eyes shut as he waits for it to power on, repeating  _ Please work please work please work, _ in his head like a mantra. Sure enough, the coffee didn’t do it too dirty and it chimes before asking for his passcode. 

When the wifi box pops up, Scott goes to select his own network — aptly named  _ Leafs4Eva _ — but stops as his finger moves past the third name down. It’s a locked network with impressive speed, and it’s called  _ You Slowed My Bandwidth I Need That For Work…  _ and suddenly Scott has a sinking feeling that Mrs. Johnson’s wifi may not be so good after all.

When Scott finally connects to his own wifi, he can’t help but feel bad. He didn’t mean to steal this person’s internet, honest… well maybe not beyond the last few minutes of that one Leafs game. That much he cops to.

But now, as he thinks about the other person who’s actually  _ paying _ for those beautifully fast streaming speeds, and using them for work no less, an uncomfortable feeling of guilt settles itself deep in his stomach. 

He wants to apologize, he really does, but he doesn’t even know what apartment the stranger is in or how to contact them. All he knows is that they need wifi for work and got creative with their network name and … hang on.

Scott feels a smile spread across his face as he realizes he  _ does _ have a way to tell the person that he’s sorry, honest, and didn’t mean to steal their internet. He could change his own wifi network name to an apology. He’s full of excitement for precisely ten seconds before he realizes that he has absolutely no idea how to change his wifi network name from what he set it to three years ago. Well then.

The only thing he has vague memories of is Danny telling him not to throw away any of the paperwork when he installed the router, and there’s really only one place all that could be. A shoebox under his bed — don’t tell his mother, she’d be horrified beyond belief — which is currently keeping some dust bunnies company. He digs it out with newfound determination and rifles through the various instruction manuals and warranties inside: TV, microwave, toaster (Who needs an instruction manual for a toaster?) and finally… the modem and router. 

Ten minutes, one pair of reading glasses and three Google searches later, and Scott is trying to think of the perfect, short-but-hopefully-sweet thing to name his now-nameless network. 

_ Sorry My WIFI Crapped Out And The Leafs Were On _ is accurate but seems kind of douchey,  _ You Have Great Streaming Speeds What’s Your Plan _ is downright offensive and  _ It’s Not My Fault You Didn’t Lock It _ is just asking for trouble. Eventually, Scott settles on  _ Sorry My Thumb Slipped Won’t Happen Again _ and presses enter, hoping that whoever is on the other side of the connection will accept his apology.

When that’s all done, he opens up his email to give it one more check for the night, and a message from an unfamiliar sender catches his eye.

She’s from the CBC, as far as he can tell, and he opens up the message, wondering what the network could possibly want him for. He’s answered questions for Marie-France before, sure, but he hasn’t really been needed much in his own right. He’s pleasantly surprised when he opens the email and sees the ask is about a podcast — he’s never done one before, this could be cool — and he’s immediately intrigued by the concept.

The sender seems friendly, and she knows Marie, and so, after skimming one of her articles in MacLean’s, he writes back on impulse.

**From:** scottmoir@teamcanada.ca

**To:** tessa.virtue@cbc.ca

_ Hi Tessa, _

_ Thanks so much for reaching out! Your podcast, from what I’ve seen, looks like a great format and I’d be honoured to be a guest on it. My schedule is pretty tight next week, but I’ve got an opening Tuesday afternoon at 2. Would that work? _

_ Best, _

_ Scott Moir _

The reply is near-instantaneous.

**From:** tessa.virtue@cbc.ca

**To:** scottmoir@teamcanada.ca

_ Tuesday works perfectly. I have an in-home recording studio but if you’d be more comfortable, I have access to an office and equipment at CBC.  _

_ \- Tessa _

He wasn’t expecting her to respond so promptly, as it’s well outside of office hours, and he isn’t immediately prepared to answer. Her credentials seem to check out, all the links she sent lead to feature articles in major publications, or to CBC podcasts, and seem to cover both sports and the arts, so he feels he isn’t likely to run into trouble heading to her home recording studio. However, he knows the CBC studio is actually close to home; he walks by it on his way to work. He saves the links to the podcasts to listen to later, and decides to answer in the morning. 

Before he checks out for the night to watch the Leafs inevitably lose, he goes back to check his neighbour’s wifi on a whim, hoping on the off chance that they saw his apology and responded in kind. He expects the third network from the top to be called the same thing it was earlier, but it isn’t. Instead it now says,  _ Likely Excuse But You’re Forgiven.  _ He thinks of replying via his network name again; it should be easier now he’s done it already.

Before he can formulate a witty response, there’s a loud crashing noise and a shout from the wall next to his. Scott stops dead in his tracks and it’s like time freezes still. Images of burglars and assaulters and all kinds of serial killers and nasty people flash before his eyes and if this weren’t so serious he’d worry if he’s been watching too many crime procedurals on TV. But this is not a cop show, it’s real life, and his neighbour might be in danger.

Then he remembers that the apartment next to his is supposed to be empty and a shiver runs down his spine for an entirely different reason. His brain lets him mull over the possibility of a haunting in his building for exactly half a second — and it’s a good one, filled with skeletons and poltergeists and all manner of creepy things — before deciding that no, that’s not happening and it’s probably a burglar after all.

His thoughts wander to Mrs. Johnson down the hall and her two cats and frail bones, and to the family with newborn twins who live three doors down. He suddenly sees himself as their only protection in the line of fire and hey, it may be a bit dramatic but it’s also damn effective because ten seconds later he’s grabbed the baseball bat Charlie gave him as a Christmas present, put on his oldest pair of sneakers and slowly opened his apartment door.

The sound came from the wall next to his living room, so Scott turns left and down the hallway, creeping forward as quietly as his sneakers will let him, all the while brandishing the bat. There’s another clatter — this one louder than the last — and Scott sucks in a breath. Oh god, he might get killed tonight.

When he reaches the door, he takes a deep breath and counts to ten. (It is during this time that he probably should notice a number of things, namely the welcome mat, the potted plant and maybe the fact that he’s about to  _ knock _ where he thinks there’s a burglar, but alas, he sees none of them and soldiers on.) He steels himself, grips the bat tighter with his right hand and raises the left to the door, knocking three times.

Scott holds his breath and adjusts his grip and all the while thinks about how hard it would be to break open a door with his shoulders and emerge uninjured. After five excruciating seconds, the door swings open, and bit by bit, he finds himself face to face with… 

… a woman in her twenties, dressed in pink pyjamas, hopping on one foot and pressing a bag of peas to the top of the other.

* * *

Tessa has one of Scott Moir’s many articles loaded on her phone and has been scrolling through it as she putters around her kitchen, putting dishes away and making herself a tea. The white tile is cold on her bare feet and she contemplates going to get socks, but thinks if she goes back into her bedroom she won’t end up coming back out and then she’ll have to put the dishes away in the morning before heading in to the studio for her one day a week running production. 

She wonders how she managed to use so many dishes to make what was supposed to be one simple meal, before it inevitably turned into take-out. She can’t really say she has a knack for anything in the kitchen, unless it’s making coffee — or making a mess, apparently. 

As she reaches to put a glass back on the middle shelf, she makes a quick note on her phone, nearly dropping the glass on the hard granite countertop and barely saving herself from having a kitchen full of shards. She’s been going through Moir’s articles on high-performance athletes and the end of their competitive careers, compiling questions to ask him for their interview on Tuesday. 

She’s already heard plenty about him from Marie-France, and chatted with her husband Patrice about him, as Scott works with several of Patrice’s athletes. He’s a psychologist and mental prep coach for Olympians and for years has been pushing for better transitioning for athletes coming up on retirement or those facing potential career-altering injuries. 

Although she knows he’s helped a lot of athletes achieve gold, it’s his work with those who don’t, those whose careers end early or who are struggling with what they call the Olympic Comedown, that interest her most. Of course it does. 

After her second surgery for her compartment syndrome failed, Tessa felt lost, and at times like her whole life was over, even at barely 21 years old. That was nine years ago, and she wishes she’d had more people in her life like this Scott Moir to help her deal with the idea of retiring and figuring out what to do with herself other than dancing. It took her nearly two years before she’d decided to enrol in Ryerson’s broadcast journalism program. A year and a half of that was spent still trying to dance on broken legs. It wasn’t until she did a radio interview with the CBC —  _ of course _ — alongside a few other corps dancers that she realized she wanted to be the one asking the questions. 

She makes a few more notes to ask Scott about what, if any, resources are available to athletes once they retire, and what resources he thinks ought to be put in place. She’s just about done with the dishes, holding her big frying pan — the heavy, cast-iron one her mom got her in hopes that once she was living on her own she’d learn to cook — in one hand, while still skimming through the article with the other. 

Two things happen almost at once. First, not paying attention, she bumps her elbow on her tea cup which had been placed precariously on the edge of the counter. Second, her grip slips on the handle of the frying pan. In a split second decision she manages to right the tea cup, saving her shattered porcelain and scalding hot liquid splashing across her little kitchen. Unfortunately, she isn’t quick enough with the frying pan and it lands hard directly on top of her foot. 

“Fuck!” she yells, and she isn’t used to how sound carries out in the open concept living area, or how her expletive bounces around the room, matched only by the sound of the pan clattering against the hard tile. If her foot didn’t hurt so badly, she’d worry about it chipping the ceramic. 

“Fuck,” she says again, this time under her breath, as she tries to take a step on her foot. She glances down and can see the red welt that’s started forming about an inch above her toes. She can already picture the deep purple bruise it’s going to leave. 

She bends over and picks up the frying pan and tosses it aggressively in the sink, as if it was the one at fault for leaping out of her hand and onto her foot. Satisfied with the clattering sound it makes against the steel sink basin, she hobbles over to the freezer to pull out the pack of peas, whose sole purpose — let’s be honest — is to act as an ice pack. 

She’s about to hop her way over to the couch with her frozen peas when she hears a banging at her front door. There are three raps in quick succession, each one louder than the last. 

She feels her heartbeat pick up speed in her chest, like the quick fluttering wings of a hummingbird. It’s after ten at night, she doesn’t know who would be knocking at her door this late in the evening. She contemplates not answering it, taking her peas to her room and hoping whoever it is just goes away. 

But then she’s thinking of the clattering pan, and the swearing and she remembers her neighbour, Mrs. Johnson, always one to worry. 

She’s only met the woman three, maybe four times and each time she found something to worry over. First it was about the fact that she lives all alone, whereupon Tessa tried to mention that Mrs. Johnson also lives alone… but was told, “I have my cats dear, and besides no one much cares about an old lady like me.” Then it was whether or not her jacket would be warm enough, or if her shoes were waterproof. She can’t imagine the poor woman hearing all that racket only to have the door go unanswered. She’ll probably have the fire department breaking down her door in under twenty minutes. 

Holding the peas to her foot, Tessa hops over to the door, if only to tell Mrs. Johnson she’s fine and she can go back to watching the evening news worry free. 

Tessa pulls open the front door, but it isn’t Mrs. Johnson who greets her….

… it’s a man. Probably in his late twenties, or early thirties, but that part is irrelevant because he’s brandishing a baseball bat, poised to strike. 

She can’t bring herself to scream because he’s just staring at her, looking just as shell-shocked as she feels. So they just stand there, on either side of her doorway, staring at each other until he finally opens his mouth.

“I thought you were a ghost,” he says, sheepishly. 

“A what?” she replies, flummoxed. “I can assure you that I am completely real, and very much alive.” 

When he finally really notices her, blinks his eyes and looks her up and down, in her pyjama tank top and little shorts, he blushes. He’s still got the baseball bat in his hand, held up near his ear. “Yeah, I can see that.”

“Are you just going to keep standing there with your bat?” she asks, because he’s clutching the damn thing so hard his knuckles are turning white.

“Uh, Yeah...I mean no. I’m sorry. I just didn’t realize someone lived here and I heard you swear and...dammit. And you’re clearly getting ready for bed and you’re hurt,” the intruder says, barely managing to tumble the words out over his tongue. His eyes keep darting from her to somewhere on the wall behind her, like he’s trying to make sure the ficus on her bookshelf isn’t going to jump out at them. It’s kind of cute how flustered he’s gotten, after barging through her door like a real Prince Charming, ready to slay a dragon.

“You’re not even holding the bat right,” she says, folding her arms across her chest.

He freezes at that, tensing up slightly in the shoulders before dragging his eyes from the tip of the bat to his hands, which are gripping it in a way that would make none of the Jays proud. A flush creeps up his neck and travels to the tips of his ears and if she weren't so annoyed with the intrusion she thinks she might have smiled at the sight. On another day, it would have been endearing. Today, however, he clears his throat awkwardly and adjusts the grip and Tessa frowns.

"Well," he starts, looking at the ground, at his hands, everywhere but her face, "I normally have better form, but I had to act on instinct, you know."

She quirks a brow.

"Instinct, huh?"

“Yeah.” He looks down and kicks his foot against the floor of her entryway and she cringes, hoping it doesn’t leave a scuff. Then he seems to realize he’s still holding the bat up in the air ready to strike and she’s really afraid he may actually kill her house plant but he finally looks at her and lowers it. “Instinct… you know… I thought you were a burglar, or…”

“A ghost,” she finishes, shaking her head. It’s after ten at night and she’s tired, and she isn’t fully convinced this entire exchange hasn’t been a dream. That this stranger with dark, tousled hair and a sharp jaw and defined nose barging through her door while she’s in her pyjamas wasn’t actually an apparition. She has to laugh at the absurdity of it. “Because I’m not real?”

The sound that escapes him is halfway between a yelp and a cough and she can tell he didn’t expect it, because his eyes go wide and he shakes his head and she has to take pity on him at some point. 

“Okay, so since we’ve established that I’m not a ghost and  _ I live here,” _ she makes a grand sweeping gesture at that, “I think it’s best we put this whole thing behind us and get some sleep.”

He nods, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly as he twists the bat on the floor. “It’s probably for the best. Sorry, by the way,” he says. He does look appropriately contrite.

“It’s okay,” she replies, because she’s tired and it’s late and she wants this to be over. “It’s good to know there’s people living here who would protect the neighbours.” She can’t help but add, “even if it’s from the other neighbours” at the end there, and thankfully, the stranger laughs.

“Well, good night then,” he says. “And sorry, again.”

“It’s okay,” she says, again, and gives him a genuine smile. “Good night to you too.”

When she shuts her door she shakes her head and lets out a sigh and wonders why she can’t stop thinking about the way his lips might look when quirked up into a smile.


	2. the (almost awkward) interview

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the absolutely lovely feedback, we're so thrilled you're liking our little story so far. Thanks to only_because3 for looking over this chapter for us.

Scott heads back to his apartment once he’s dealt with the so-called burglar slash ghost — who really turned out to be his neighbour — and tries to make sense of even one little bit of what just happened. He’s pretty sure he turned into an incoherent mess once she opened the door and he just stood there, incorrectly brandishing a baseball bat and losing all capabilities of speech.

It wasn’t his finest moment.

He can’t for the life of him remember what she said to him, or he to her; he just knows that somehow, blessedly, they’d ended the conversation and he’d stopped aiming a fucking bat at her head. _Well done, Moir, real smooth._ It’s as he’s wracking his brain for any shreds of memory from the conversation that his thoughts finally start playing catch-up, and he realizes a few things with alarming clarity.

One: she was really pretty. Like really, really beautiful. Even hopping around on one foot in pyjamas (tiny, pink pyjamas that left little room for the imagination, he might add, but he won’t, because he’s not a creep) with a scowl on her face, Scott is pretty sure she was one of the prettiest women he’s ever seen. Two: he didn’t get her name. He has no idea who she is, and randomly knocking on her door to ask her for it might not be the best idea, considering… Three: she probably hates his guts and will ignore him for all eternity.

He’s ninety-nine percent sure that “banging on your neighbour’s door in the middle of the night whilst threatening them with a bat and accusing them of being a ghost” does not fall on the list of good neighbourly behaviour, but rather the “my neighbour is probably a crazed person and is to be avoided at all costs” one. Not exactly the best prerequisite for further conversation. 

Sighing, Scott scrubs a hand over his face and plops down on his sofa. Adrenaline is still coursing through his veins, and he’s far too wired to go to sleep right now. His laptop is still sitting open on the sofa, and Scott taps the trackpad to open it, where his email is still up from earlier. Tessa from the podcast’s message is front and centre, and he hovers over the links to her podcast episodes.

He’s definitely too alert to sleep now, so he thinks he might as well listen to an episode in the hopes that it’ll calm him down some. He clicks the CBC link — it’s an episode with ex-speed skater Anastasia Bucsis — and presses the play button on the website, closing his eyes and leaning back on the couch as the advert and intro music starts. 

Five seconds later, the host starts talking and Scott’s eyes snap open. _Wait, what?_ He shoots upright in his seat and turns up the volume. _It can’t be._ Ten seconds after that, he realizes it _has_ to be. He recognized the voice half a second after she started talking, but didn’t let his mind comprehend the possibility of it actually being true. But now, as the host introduces herself and her guest, Scott has to very quickly come to terms with the fact that Tessa Virtue, ex-ballet dancer and host of a CBC podcast, is his new neighbour. 

His new neighbour, whom he threatened with a baseball bat just minutes earlier. His new neighbour, who probably hates his guts for all eternity. His new neighbour, with whom he has to sit down for a number of hours on Tuesday and talk candidly and eloquently about his life’s work.

Well this is bound to get interesting.

(He grabs his phone for a quick Google search too, just to be absolutely certain, and when pictures pop up as he searches her name his breath hitches, because damn, she’s even more beautiful than she was just ten minutes ago. He’s completely fucked.)

Scott groans, falling back into the couch cushions with a huff and wishing desperately that he hadn’t run out of beer two days ago. A cold Molson would really help right now. _Fuck._ He never paused the podcast, he realizes, and his neighbour — Tessa, he reminds himself — is still talking and chatting with Anastasia. Scott is currently not in the mindset to do _anything,_ including pausing a podcast, apparently, because he just lets it play and listens on.

Two minutes in, he’s enraptured. Tessa has a very soothing voice, for starters, but it’s also the way she talks to her guests that has him listening with rapt attention. He can tell from the get-go that she knows her stuff, does her research and knows exactly what questions to ask and how to put her guests at ease. Her conversation with Anastasia flows naturally, and he feels a bit like he’s listening in on two friends catching up, not an interviewer and interviewee going through a series of questions.

From the conversation, Scott gleans that when Tessa was still dancing, she had a spot secured in the corps of the National Ballet. She’d had to quit though, due to an overuse injury (he suspects compartment syndrome, based on experience with his own clients) and two failed surgeries. Now, she’s a writer and podcast host, and Scott can’t help but be impressed by how she turned her whole life around and came out stronger for it.

(He sees stories like hers in the office often: young, promising athletes with bodies that just quit. Every time he works with someone in that situation, he can’t help but feel for them, for the anger and frustration they must be experiencing because the tool, the vehicle they’d relied on for so long to get them to the peak, has turned against them.

So, he gets it. And he can’t help but feel sorrow and pride bloom in his chest in equal measure as he thinks about Tessa and all she’s overcome.)

The next hour passes in the blink of an eye, as Scott listens to Tessa talk with Anastasia and learns more about both women’s stories. When Tessa thanks Anastasia for coming on the podcast and says goodbye to her listeners, he can’t believe the episode is over already and he desperately wants more. He switches to his phone for mobility’s sake and queues up the playlist, heading over to the bathroom to start brushing his teeth while the podcast plays in the background.

She’s introducing the guest to her listeners with vague clues and Scott nearly spits out his toothpaste when she says his name: Mike Babcock. _Tessa got Babsy on the podcast?_ He can’t quite believe it, or how he didn’t know about the podcast for that matter, but he’s certainly glad he does now.

As Tessa talks to Babcock, Scott can’t help but marvel at the way she makes every interview feel personal, despite the fact that she surely can’t know every guest beforehand. Yet somehow, listening to her talk to her guests is like eavesdropping on a chat between old friends and Scott is enthralled. Babsy always has great things to say, that he’s known for years now, but he finds himself just as interested in hearing bits of Tessa’s own story, the anecdotes she sprinkles in to make her guests feel at ease. It’s when Babcock leaves Tessa’s listeners with one last piece of advice, telling them that “the scariest thing in life is that you can have everything you want,” that Scott really realizes the sheer scale of what he’s signed up for.

He has to admit that he underestimated Tessa, as much as it makes him a bit of a douche. When he replied to her email, he was fully expecting to sit down for a chat for a small, niche podcast, not one with as much reach as Tessa’s apparently has. But Babsy? And, as he reads through the list of the other guests she’s had on, apparently every great Canadian athlete or dancer from the last few decades.

Suddenly, he’s feeling far less calm about Tuesday’s pending interview as he wonders how the hell _he,_ a sports psychologist who had a slightly-above-average juniors career in ice dance before his partner quit and he went to university, is going to fare in the virtual company of some of his personal heroes. Scott groans and wishes, for the umpteenth time, that he had a beer.

He flops back on the cushions of his bed with a huff, scrubbing a hand across his face. 

As he’s wallowing in the misery of realizing he’s going to be on the same podcast as Babsy (which might finally be a story he’d get Chiddy’s full attention for) his brain reminds him of something else entirely, which has him sitting up in bed within seconds. Tessa is his neighbour, and he’s met her already, and he’s going to show up at her door on Tuesday and he has no idea how she’s going to take _that_ particular revelation.

If her behaviour tonight and her absolute no-bullshit response to his little stunt with the baseball bat are anything to go by, Scott is pretty sure she won’t be amused. And fuck, he still needs to reply to her email. He briefly considers coming clean in his response, but then decides it’s probably way too creepy a message to relay via email. Not that showing up at her door when she’s expecting a stranger, not her bat-brandishing neighbour, is any better. At least that way he can explain himself as soon as she sees him.

Scott groans again. 

For a fucking psychologist, he really has a lot of problems of his own to sort out.

For now, he’ll settle for answering Tessa’s email.

 **From:** scottmoir@teamcanada.ca

 **To:** tessa.virtue@cbc.ca

_Tessa,_

_I’d be happy to do the recording at your apartment. Let me know your address and I look forward to seeing you on Tuesday._

_\- Scott_

He hits send on the email, cringing inwardly. He knows exactly what her address is — literally one door over from his — and he is looking forward to seeing her, even if it’s mixed with a whole lot of trepidation. At least this time, he knows he won’t start asking her if she’s a ghost, or try to clobber her over the head with a baseball bat. It’s the little things.

He gets up from his bed to grab a glass of water from the kitchen, slipping out of his room in the dark and crashing into the baseball bat he left in the hallway just seconds later. It slides down the wall and falls on the floor with a clatter, and Scott shouts as he stubs his toe on the sideboard in his hallway, which he collided with as he was trying to avoid slipping on the bat. So much for that idea.

“Fuck!” he yells, and the irony of the whole situation washes over him. _Of course_ he’s the one with the stubbed toe now, to match Tessa’s. He limps over to the kitchen, using his phone as a flashlight, and hopes he has his own pack of peas in the freezer too, because his toe is throbbing like a bitch. He does, thankfully, and he winces as the cold soothes his aching foot. This day has been bizarre from start to finish and this — standing one-legged in his kitchen while icing his foot and listening to his neighbour talk to Marnie McBean (he’s started another episode of the podcast to distract from the pain) about the importance of communication in athletic partnerships — is somehow an oddly appropriate ending.

Tessa’s reply is waiting for him when he finally sits back down on his bed, and he wonders if she’s having as hard a time falling asleep as he is. His expletive-laden trip to the kitchen probably didn’t help, he thinks with a groan.

 **From:** tessa.virtue@cbc.ca

 **To:** scottmoir@teamcanada.ca

_Scott,_

_Perfect. I’ve attached a maps link with directions to my address. I look forward to meeting you tomorrow. Do you drink coffee? I can put on a pot before you arrive._

_\- Tessa_

Tuesday is going to be interesting.

* * *

Tessa opens her door at five till two on Tuesday to find her neighbour standing there, hand still raised to knock once more. “If this is about you barging in the other night don’t worry about it,” Tessa says before he can get in so much as a greeting. She’s trying to wave him off before Scott arrives. “No harm, no fowl.”

He smiles at her, tilting his head to the side like he has a secret she isn’t privy to, though he seems to be blushing a little too, and he taps his foot nervously on the hall floor. “How’s your foot?” he asks. 

“It’s fine.” She bites her lip to stop herself from flat-out telling him to leave. Which, she honestly doesn’t even want to do. She was annoyed the other night, sure, but in the light of day he seems like a nice enough guy. He’s dressed smartly, in dark, well fitting jeans, into which he’s neatly tucked a pressed pale blue dress shirt, and she thinks that yeah, he’s actually got the Prince Charming thing down. If it were any other day she’d be touched he came by to check in on her. “Really, it’s not a big deal at all.”

He’s still smiling at her with this dopey grin, and she has to admit (when she isn’t tired and startled and in pain) that he’s pretty cute. But Scott should be arriving any minute and she’s been looking forward to this interview all week: her notebook of questions is waiting on her desk and there’s a fresh pot of coffee brewing. She really doesn’t want to be dealing with an annoying, albeit attractive, neighbour right now.

“I listened to your podcast,” he says. “Every episode, well almost every episode, there were a lot. They’re amazing. You’re amazing.” His eyes are wide as he looks at her, and he’s rushing out the words like he is excited but isn’t sure he should be saying all this. She isn’t sure he should be either; she doesn’t recall giving him her first name, let alone last name for him to have looked her up. There’s a chance he stumbled across her podcasts on his own, she guesses. Her face _is_ all over the promotional videos and pictures. Maybe he listened to her interview from last year with Mike Babcock; he looks like a guy who watches hockey, god he’s probably _Leafs4Eva…_ which would mean…

“Have you been stealing my wifi?” she asks, her hands immediately going to her hips. Could he get her personal information through her open wifi network? Is that how he knows about her podcast?

The look of shock is evident on his face as his eyes practically bulge right out of their sockets. “Shit, that was you?” 

She nods.

He looks down at his feet, the tips of his ears colouring red as his hand goes to rub at the back of his neck and that’s really all the confirmation she needs. “Oh god, I’m sorry. But it really was inadvertent!” he says, still looking at his feet. “Mostly...the Leafs were on and mine cut out and your network was open...I didn’t mean to stay on it...fuck…I’m really sorry about that, honestly.” 

He seems genuinely upset, and appropriately embarrassed about the whole thing. She can tell by the way he still won’t look back up at her and is pretty much wearing down the flooring with his foot. It’s endearing in a way, how he gets flustered, like he did the other night, bat in hand, to save the neighbours from a paranormal intruder, only to realize it was just Tessa. Tessa in her camisole and little shorts (that she should have been more embarrassed about, was as soon as she closed the door and glanced her nipples through the thin fabric in the mirror), bag of frozen peas on her foot. 

But it all seems rather suspect for a moment. Stealing her internet, knocking on her door late at night, now he’s here again knocking at her door to tell her he’s listened to all her podcasts — well almost all, there are a lot; she’s on to her third season of Virtuous Pursuits. She doesn’t even know his name, or what unit this mystery neighbour lives in. He doesn’t _look_ creepy though. He looks charming, maybe a little goofy, and rough around the edges but soft on the inside — especially when he runs his hand through his hair, dishevelling it. He doesn’t _seem_ creepy, or weird at all. Yet, he’s here at her door at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday telling her he listened to her podcast. 

“Did you hack me? Are you stalking me?” She thinks she sounds more confused than accusatory. 

He, for his part, looks horrified for about a second and a half, his eyes widening, eyebrows shooting to his hairline, before breaking out into the biggest laugh she’s ever heard. Actually, that’s not true, she has heard that exact laugh before, through the walls, so he must live directly beside her. She has no idea what to make of his laughter, until he speaks again. 

“I’m sorry...did I _hack_ you? I had to use the manual to figure out how to change my network name to apologize.” He’s still laughing, but then his face morphs into something more serious, eyes narrowing. “And I would never stalk you...anyone...I...no. I...god...no...I swear I’m not a creep or anything.” 

He’s starting to get flustered again, drowning himself in his words and she takes pity on him, but she’s still confused. Still wants this internet-thieving, maybe-creep neighbour to leave before Scott Moir arrives. “Then how do you know who I am?” 

His face blanches, eyes going a bit buggy again before he says, “Oh shit!” He puts his face in his hands, shaking his head, before looking back up at her. “I am making a terrible impression. I’m Scott Moir, your interview. I’m also your neighbour, the one who stole your internet and barged through your door with a baseball bat.” 

She just stares at him. She’s not at all sure what to do or say in this moment. This man, her wifi-stealing, bat-brandishing, hockey-loving neighbour, is Scott Moir. Renowned sports psychologist, top of his field, one of team Canada’s greatest behind-the-scenes assets, Scott Moir. She can’t quite get the two to connect in her head. Now she’s the one who must look crazy, standing with one hand clutching her half-open door, the other firmly placed on her hip, not speaking. She’s probably looking at him like _he’s_ the ghost. 

_Scott Moir._

She feels like an idiot for half a minute, staring dumbstruck, because she should have realized. She’s been reading everything she can about him for the past week, even watched a number of his old junior programs and interviews. She should have recognized him. Yet, how could she have? All she has to go off is what he looked like thirteen years ago. On the official Team Canada site his headshot is missing, still the default filler. His social media is all set to private and she felt it was out of line to add him before meeting him. Little did she know… 

She must eventually invite him in, because pretty soon he’s awkwardly following her through her hallway into her living room, making sure to keep a safe distance, like he isn’t actually sure she is convinced he’s not just some creep she’s let into her home — she’s pretty sure he isn’t, but this whole thing is still weird. She stops abruptly between the kitchen and living room and he stops just short of bumping into her. Tucking her hair behind her ear, she turns to face him. He’s watching her with rapt attention, a soft smile playing at his lips as she looks up at him. 

“Um,” she starts, more unsure of herself than she typically is with interviewees. She’s normally well prepared, and highly professional, while still being friendly. But this isn’t exactly a normal situation. “I’ll go get us some coffee, if you’d like?” She knows she needs one. “And, um, you can just head into the studio? It’s the first door down the hall there.” She points in the general direction. 

He nods, and smiles. “Sure Tessa, a coffee sounds great.” 

She usually hates the sound of her full name, preferring Tess. Tessa always makes her feel like people are mad at her. Except for when Scott says it, she realizes; there is something so soft about the way his voice wraps around the sounds. It’s gentle, comforting. 

He’s already started walking away when she realizes she hasn’t asked how he likes his coffee. She’s about to say something, when, like he’s read her thoughts, he turns around and says, “Just black is fine for me.” 

In the kitchen she grabs two mugs, digging through her cupboard to find the one she’s looking for, hoping it will help cut the tension a bit. It’s a vintage Toronto Maple Leafs mug with the Leafs logo and #1 Fan written on the side. It had once belonged to one of her brothers, who eventually gifted it to her years ago, because she always loved due to it’s perfect size — big enough that she didn’t need frequent refills. She pours Scott’s black coffee into it, and gets out her well-used _Life without Ballet is POINTless_ mug for herself — she just started using it again a few years ago. For a bit after retirement it had made her sad, the message feeling a little too true. She adds a bit of milk and sugar to her own, before taking a steadying breath and heading into the studio.

Scott is waiting for her in the studio, sitting at one of the oversized chairs at the desk (she has two extra comfy office chairs on either side of her table-sized desk; often it can take hours to complete an interview and she likes everyone to feel comfortable). He’s swivelling it back and forth, pushing off the desk, while looking around the relatively small room. There isn’t much to see, she has her diploma on the wall — she’s proud of it— along with a few old photos of her dancing, and some framed ones from a few favourite guests. In the corner of the room she has an overstuffed armchair, one she often curls up in when she’s editing, otherwise the room is mostly occupied by the desk, her computer and recording equipment on top of it. 

She places the coffee in front of him and he looks up at her with a soft sort of half smile. “Nice mug,” he says, laughing. 

“Thought you might like it,” she says taking her own seat, the tension already seeming to lift a bit. 

He takes a tentative sip of his coffee and then his hand goes to rub at the back of his neck again. “I really am sorry,” he says, as he looks at her. “For all of it. The wifi, thinking you were a ghost...god I basically threatened you with a baseball bat.” 

She laughs. “Which would have been _so_ effective against a paranormal entity?” 

He laughs too then, and the sound makes her feel warm inside. “I have no idea what I was thinking, honestly. I just heard noises and I thought that no one lived here...I guess you’re normally just super quiet. How long have you even lived here?”

She shrugs. “About four months. I also spend a lot of my time in here.” She gestures around the room. “Sound doesn’t really travel in or out.” 

“Oh,” he says. “That makes sense. Anyway, I’m really sorry about that and for just showing up like I did just now. You know, without a proper introduction. To be honest I didn’t listen to your podcast before I agreed to meet you, so I had no idea who you were the other night. And when I listened, and found your pictures on your site...I dunno, I felt like it would be more awkward to email you and say ‘by the way, I’m your crazy neighbour, the one with the baseball bat’... I was probably wrong.” 

He’s staring into his coffee mug now, not able to keep eye contact with her for the last bit there. She sees red spreading up his neck and to his ears again, his fingers tapping restlessly along the side of his mug. It makes her smile and shake her head with a fondness she hadn’t expected. It’s easy to take pity on him, to forgive what seem to have been honest mistakes. 

“No, you’re right, it probably would have been weirder. Why don’t we just start? Jump right in, yeah?” 

He looks up at her now, with these kind, warm eyes and that dopey grin again. He reminds her a bit of a puppy. “Yeah, that sounds really good.” 

She already has everything prepared, her notes and questions in front of her, recording equipment ready to go, all she has to do is press record. “So, I normally record the intro separately, after I’ve edited the interview itself together. I’m just going to hit record and then I like to just kind of start off getting to know each other,” as she says this her heart speeds up, a galloping horse in her chest, like she’s picking up on his nerves from across the table. Even though she’s done this so many times before, this feels different. She rationalizes it’s because how they first met the other night, that it’s still a bit of shock wearing off. “It’s a good ice-breaker before jumping into the hard-hitting questions.” 

Scott is nodding at her from across the table, and suddenly he’s looking a lot more nervous. Not in the embarrassed, caught-out way he had earlier, like a first date kind of nervous (which is a ridiculous comparison and she’s going to stop making it, immediately). She smiles at him, just a soft little smile, that pushes her cheeks up, squinting her eyes. She hopes it’s reassuring. She hits record. _Here goes nothing._

“So Scott,” she starts, thinking of how to lighten things up, hopefully make him laugh. “I hear you really like my podcast. Just listened to all of it? Or was that almost? There are a lot of episodes.” 

She’s nervous for a split second, that maybe she took it too far, but then he laughs. He looks shocked for a second first, like he didn’t expect her to make a joke, but then he throws back his head and laughs. 

“Yeah,” he says once he’s stopped. “I may have binged the first two seasons all in one day, you’re really impressive.” 

“So, you’re excited to be here then?” she asks, with a tilt of her head and a smile. 

“No!” he says, too quickly, before blushing and immediately back tracking. “I mean yes! But mostly I’m a little nervous. I still have no idea why you picked me to be here, honestly,” his voice gets a bit quieter, more serious as he looks around the room, his eyes stopping on the picture of her and Mike Babcock from last year. “You’ve had so many greats on here, and you’re so full of insight, I feel like small fish in comparison. Like I have so little to offer.”

“Well, first I think you have a lot to offer. But asking you here was partly selfish. When I read about your work it really resonated with me. I don’t often talk about how bad it was, but I really struggled during and after my injury,” she says, smiling softly. “I pushed myself too hard out of fear and then felt like I lost everything. I had no one there at them time to advocate for me to get the mental health help I needed, so your work impresses me. Now, having gone through what I did and come out the other side it’s something I believe is so important and you’re doing just that. Don’t minimize how important that work is, Scott.”

At that he takes a deep breath and looks at her, and she can’t exactly discern what kind of look it is, but it makes her feel something. It’s like he’s trying to figure her out, crack her open. It’s too much so she barrels on. 

“So, speaking of your work,” she starts, moving them back to safer territory. “I read that you were an ice dancer growing up. How did you transition from that to a career in psychology?”

“Well,” Scott says, smiling. “It’s kind of a long story…”


	3. the (orchestrated) follow-up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was a point in the planning process for this fic where it was supposed to be a quick meet-cute oneshot. That, uh, did not happen. We're honestly okay with it though. 
> 
> Thank you again for all your lovely feedback, and we hope you like chapter three!
> 
> (Also, neither of us are sports psychologists, so we've presented the podcast in a bit of a different way.)

The two hours Scott spends talking to Tessa might be the two fastest hours of his life. It feels like no time has passed at all by the time she’s done asking questions and both their coffee mugs sit empty on the desk before them, even though the sun streaming in from the window of her office has shifted and warm late-afternoon light is now drenching Tessa in a honeyed glow.

She’s curled up in the desk chair she’s sitting in, her legs tucked under herself, and Scott wonders, with a faint smile, if she ever gets so relaxed when she’s doing an interview with someone who’s not already her friend, so comfortable and conversational. (He secretly hopes she doesn’t.)

Tessa is smiling as she turns off the microphones and taps a few keys on her laptop, and Scott grabs his mug and offers to take it, and hers, to the kitchen to put in the dishwasher.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Tessa says, blushing slightly, and Scott can’t help but smile at the sight.

“Hey, it’s no big deal,” he says, waving a hand. “Besides, you’ve got all this stuff to deal with, and I have a feeling that I shouldn’t be left unsupervised with any technology.” He goes for self-deprecating on the last bit there, but after the wifi disaster, the statement is a touch truer than he would like to admit. He feels a little bit proud when he’s rewarded with a dry chuckle from Tessa.

“You might have a point there,” she quips, and he gets up, mugs in hand.

On his way to the kitchen, Scott lets the past few hours mull over in his head, from his initial awkward speech at her doorway to her realization — and quite frankly, undisguised shock — that yes, he is the neighbour who threatened her with a baseball bat, and her wifi thief to boot. That particular piece of information was news to him as well, and he feels even more awful for his (not-so) accidental thievery now that he knows her network is being used to upload episodes of the very podcast he’s been a guest on.

That brings him to the podcast itself, and to the startling realization that it hadn’t felt like an interview at all. Tessa has this way of connecting with her guest, of making them feel like they  _ want _ to tell her things, and it’s both reassuring in the moment and unnerving in the aftermath. 

She’d gotten right to the core of him within the first ten minutes of their conversation, he can’t help but think, as he rinses out the last dregs of coffee and opens her dishwasher. She’d seen right past the outer layer of goofiness and self-deprecation that he often reverts to (if he were to apply some of his own training to himself, which he knows is a recipe for disaster, he’d say he uses the veneer to make others comfortable in his presence, to lighten moods and to keep up the “funny dude” persona that had been so easy to hide behind for so many years) and get at the motivation he has for his work, his purpose, and his own history with sport.

Victoria, his former skating partner, had quit on him right at the cusp of their transition into their senior careers. She’d been done and fed up with the stress of skating, with the constant pressures and expectations and absolute rigidity of dedicating oneself to a singular thing for at least thirty hours each week.

She’d quit, and Scott had dutifully gone to partner tryouts and skated with other girls and smiled at their parents who offered shiny new car leases and apartments in Canton so he could train with Marina and Igor and it was all happening just as it should, unfolding like a playbook, until Scott had finally realized what was happening and actually taken a step back to ask himself if he  _ wanted _ any of it. (A “step back” might actually have been four beers with Danny in a shitty bar in Michigan, somewhere off the highway in the middle of nowhere, but it sounds better to call it “soul-searching,” according to Chiddy, Marie  _ and _ Patch, so he’s gonna stick with that.)

He’d come to two conclusions that night, not ranked in order of importance. One: Molson is forever the superior beer. And two: Scott wasn’t really sure if he wanted to go back to the constraints of ice dance either, now that the partner he’d had since age eleven said she wanted to stop. Maybe it had been a sign from the universe.

Maybe he was meant to be doing something else in his life, other than working on edges and spread eagles and step sequences from dawn to dusk. So he’d quit too.

He’d quit and moved home and taken some time to “find himself” (more beer, more dingy bars, girls that weren’t Victoria, an ill-fated driving trip and three speeding tickets) and after four months, he had an online high school diploma, far too long a tab at Molly Bloom’s and a mother ready to read him the riot act.

That’s how he found himself writing university applications — “delaying the real world” was the objective here — and eventually going to Western for a degree in psychology. His first-year sports psych prof had held the most engaging lectures, by far, and he realized that all that knowledge would’ve been immensely helpful to him a year ago, as Victoria began to rethink her life plans and he stood there, utterly unmoored.

Now, years later, he’s able to provide for other athletes what he himself would have needed at the end of his own career, and during it too, if he’s being honest: a voice of compassion, of understanding, someone who  _ gets _ it and can help them figure out what’s best for them as people. He knows just how gruelling the day-to-day is, how injuries feel like the end of the world, how the comedown into reality can be like a slap in the face.

He gets it, and he feels a tremendous responsibility in being the one called in to help.

As he shuts Tessa’s dishwasher, she emerges from the studio, a faint smile playing across her features. She thanks him again for putting away the mugs and then they just stand there for a bit, the silence hanging awkward and heavy between them. She finally clears her throat.

“Well, uh,” she starts, looking askance at a painting on the wall behind him, before schooling her face into a more professional expression. “Thank you for coming over for this,” she says, and her interviewer voice is back, along with a bright smile. “It was so great to talk with you.”

He grins too and scratches at the back of his neck and finally manages a “thank you so much for having me, and wanting to talk about mental prep and all that.” Then he lets out a dry laugh. “And for, you know, letting me inside your apartment after the whole bat incident.”

She laughs, her eyes crinkling at the corner in a way that does odd things to his heart. “It was definitely a… memorable introduction.” She walks him all the way back to his own apartment (well, she really just follows him out of hers and takes three steps down the hall) and waves as he opens the door. He smiles at her, says goodbye and feels the lock click shut behind him.

Immediately, he slumps down on his couch with a sigh. He can’t get Tessa’s smile out of his head, the way she throws back her head when she’s laughing, the crinkle of her eyes, how she had fiddled with the two rings on her middle finger, deep in thought. He can’t get  _ any _ of her out of his thoughts, and he wants to kick himself for it. It’s his neighbour, for god’s sake, and now his interviewer. He’s probably only ever going to pass her in the hall for ten seconds, maybe smile and nod, nothing more.

He’s jerked out of his daze when his phone pings a few minutes later. It’s an email from Tessa, and he can’t help the way his heart beats faster in his chest at the mere sight of her name on the screen.

**From:** tessa.virtue@cbc.ca

**To:** scottmoir@teamcanada.ca

_ Scott,  _

_ I apologize, but I completely forgot to schedule any time to take promotional footage with you. I typically post some pictures and an Instagram video with each episode, usually shot somewhere that fits in with the guest’s line of work. _

_ Would we be able to schedule some time at the rink you work at? I’d like to combine your current job with your past skating career for the location. _

_ Let me know if that would be possible, and what date/time works best. My camera guy will handle the rest. Thank you again for the lovely chat. _

_ \- Tessa _

* * *

Tessa smooths her hair down for the fourth time, tucking it behind her ear, before chancing one last glance in the rearview mirror of the CBC media van. Jeff, her cameraman and friend, is already inside to check out the lighting situation and she’s immediately regretting letting him go in first—without her. Now she has to go in to the rink, where Scott spends so many of his working hours, alone. She’s being ridiculous, she knows this. So utterly ridiculous. Knowing this doesn’t stop the heat she feels rising in her cheeks as she exits the van or the way her heart skips a beat at the thought of seeing Scott again.

They ended up having a great interview. She thinks it might be one of her favourites. She became so engrossed in talking to him, being in his presence, that she’d nearly forgotten that she was interviewing him. Not only did he speak passionately and knowledgeably about his field (with lists of ways to improve overall mental health for athletes both before and after the competition is over) but he also has a rich and complicated history with his sport — just as she has with hers. 

After, she’d walked him back to his own door and had completely forgotten to ask him if he’d be able to meet again to film a quick promotional video or take some photos for her social media. Which is so unlike her; she’s always on top of things like that. Once she’d realized, she’d contemplated just knocking on his door, just a few steps down the hall from her own, to ask him, but she deemed that too unprofessional, settling instead for an email — even though that felt too impersonal. He’d responded back right away, but without seeing him, without hearing his voice, she had no way to gauge whether he felt any of the same anticipation that was bubbling up in her stomach at the prospect of seeing him again. 

She shakes her arms out, as if she could shake the nerves out her fingertips. Because that’s what this is, nervousness, which makes absolutely no sense. She has no reason to feel nervous. No reason to worry if her hair is lying flat or if her lip gloss shade is too dark. Is her outfit okay? She straightens her top one more time as she pulls the door to the rink open. 

She’s been interviewing and doing promotional videos for years. She’s had many big-named guests on her podcast, ones who reasonably could have made her nervous and starstruck. She once did an on-screen interview with Colonel Chris Hadfield for a CBC segment for crying out loud! Though she needed a moment to collect herself afterward, she didn’t feel the twinge of nerves prickling under her skin at all the entire interview. And she did a sit down interview with Sophie Gregoire Trudeau for an article about her  _ FitSpirit  _ initiative. She could have felt nervous about that, but she didn’t. So, what is wrong with her now? Why does she feel like she wants to run back to the van and hide? 

“You look even more high-strung than usual,” Jeff says, as soon as she’s walked through the door and feels the cool burst of rink air brush over her cheeks.

She shakes her head forcefully. “I do not!” she protests, before stopping and looking at the shadow of her reflection in the glass doors. “Do I?” 

Jeff nods, his lips quirking up into a questioning smile. “You do,” he affirms, putting a friendly hand on her shoulder. “Why so nervous, Tess?” 

“Is it obvious?” she asks, shaking her arms out again, looking around the entry to make sure Scott’s not nearby just yet. She doesn’t want him to see her like this, all coiled tight with whatever the hell this is. “I don’t even know why, I just can’t seem to shake this.” 

Jeff considers for a moment, adjusting his camera on his arm, gracefully shifting it along with his feet to step closer to her. Tessa has known Jeff for years; they were in the ballet together, trained together as teens. When Jeff’s own injury forced him into retirement Tessa helped get him an internship at CBC alongside her, and here they are now. She’d consider him one of her best friends and he’s the best cameraman to drag out on little promotional trips like this. Except today, because he knows her, can read her nerves — and she knows he’s not going to drop it. 

“I thought the interview went well?” he asks. 

She nods. “It was great, really, really great.” 

He raises his eyebrows. “Two reallys? Wow, Tess.” 

She rolls her eyes at him. “It was good, okay? He’s an interesting guy, and he really knows his field.” 

“Mhm,” Jeff hums. “He really knows his sports psych and that’s why you’re acting like this. I’m sure it could be nothing else at all.”

Tessa bites at her bottom lip and heaves in a sigh. “He’s also my neighbour.” 

Jeff considers her words for a minute and she can see the exact moment realization dawns on him, his eyes widening, mouth gaping open. “Oh my god. He’s not  _ that  _ neighbour, is he?” 

Tessa nods. “The wifi thief with the baseball bat, yeah.” 

Jeff laughs, a full-on cackle, his head flung back in mirth. His cheeks are flushed and she’s pretty certain she can see tears gathering in the corner of his eyes when he looks back up at her. “I can’t believe I get to meet wifi guy, or should he be bat guy?” 

“Scott,” Tessa says, rolling her eyes at him. “His name is Scott.” 

Jeff is still smiling, gleeful from his little outburst. “And you’re nervous because you think he’s going to come at you with a baseball bat again? Do you think he may try to steal the camera?” 

She swats him on the shoulder, turning herself away from him as she feels an unexpected heat creeps up from her chest to colour her cheeks. She looks down the hall to make sure Scott isn’t coming, before glancing down at her feet. Biting her lip, she’s trying to hold back a laugh at the image of Scott trying to wrestle the bulky camera away from Jeff, who currently looks like realization is dawning on his face. 

“Oh. My. God,” Jeff says, punctuating each word. “You like him. You like Mr. wifi-thieving, bat-wielding, sports psychologist.” 

Tessa whips her head back up to look at him, her eyes wide, her mouth is probably hanging open too. “I absolutely do not. Our relationship is purely professional. I mean, he is my neighbour, so maybe I might run into him in the hall, or the lobby or something…” 

Jeff, now that he’s seemingly decided that she likes Scott, is not paying attention to anything she’s saying. He’s smiling to himself like figuring this out was some great accomplishment. He’s about to say something, opens his mouth to, but then closes it again. She’s about to tell him to just come out with it when she hears a familiar voice calling her name. 

Right before she turns, she sees Jeff mouth  _ oh, he’s cute, _ and then she’s face-to-face with Scott Moir. He’s in grey dress pants today, with a navy button up tucked neatly into them, and it almost clashes with the red and black Team Canada puffer jacket that hangs open overtop. She can’t help but smile at the look, so undeniably Scott. 

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he says, breathless, like he ran straight across the arena. “I got caught up with one of my pairs. I forgot the amount of drama having a partner can involve.” 

He’s smiling at her, this delightfully charming, slightly crooked smile that makes all the butterflies that have taken up residence in her abdomen flutter about frantically. He runs a hand through his hair and looks expectantly between her and Jeff (who is oh-so-helpfully nudging her in the ribs). 

“No worries at all Scott, thanks for agreeing to meet with me again.” She goes to put her hand out to shake his, and immediately feels like an idiot — they’ve met, why is she going in for a handshake? She’s about to pull away, hoping he didn’t notice, but he looks at her just as her hand is awkwardly raised at her side like she’s going for some weird mid-level high five. 

He quirks one of his brows, cocking his head to the side like he’s trying to decide what to make of her sudden awkwardness. He decides to save her from floundering by meeting her hand with his. But instead of a simple high five, he clasps his fingers around hers and uses her hand to pull her into a side hug. It’s moderately less mortifying than the half-handshake, half-high five she was apparently going for. She takes a moment to soak in the feeling of his arm around her, of being pressed into his side, his warmth seeping into her. It feels comfortable, it feels right. 

But then, Jeff is clearing his throat and she’s jarred back into reality. She quickly — maybe too quickly — extracts herself from Scott’s embrace, turning to look at Jeff, whose smile tells her she’ll be in for a conversation all about her love life later. She hopes it involves wine… lots of wine. 

“Scott,” she says, turning between him and Jeff and fixing Jeff with a glare that means  _ behave. _ “This is my friend and cameraman from the CBC, Jeffery Buttle. Jeff, this is Scott Moir.”

The two men shake hands and exchange pleasantries before Jeff says, “I’m really sorry to rush us along, and I’m not sure if Tess told you, but I only have about a half hour...gotta go film the news, you know.” Tessa knows this to be entirely untrue; Jeff has nothing else to film until nearly six and it's only three. “Tessa and I should be able to get all the footage we need in that time though. We’re pretty efficient. But, she was thinking that maybe the two of you could go grab a post-rink hot chocolate? So she can take a few casual photos?” 

She’s going to kill him, she thinks. Jeffery Buttle is officially dead to her.  _ Dead _ . She’s about to try to correct him, to say something,  _ anything _ to change the course of conversation but Scott is already nodding in agreement. 

“That sounds great,” he says. “I’d love to grab a hot chocolate with you after, Tess,” he pauses, his cheeks reddening. “You know, for the photos you need...I guess we should get started, eh?”

“Sounds awesome!” Tessa just barely manages to force out, wincing at how her voice cracks at the end.  _ Awesome?  _ Since when does she call things awesome? She’s decided that she definitely hates Jeff right now. This whole thing feels a bit too much like coercion.

She doesn’t get a chance to say anything to Jeff before he’s smiling at her like nothing at all out of the ordinary occurred and telling them they’re rolling. 

She clears her throat awkwardly, looking for a place to start before saying: “Thanks for meeting me here.” She’s trying to get them both back to safer ground, even if that means repeating what she said before. Scott seems to sense that she’s tensing up, and turns toward her, a soft smile on his face. She shakes herself out of it.

Tessa spends the next few minutes explaining to Scott what they need to get on tape, and Jeff throws in some helpful (and sometimes not-so-helpful) suggestions about light and angles and sound levels. They end up with their backs to the ice for the opening shot, and Tessa slips back into presenter mode as she introduces Scott to the camera.

He smiles faintly as she recaps his history and career in a sentence or two, and thanks her for the opportunity to talk about mental health and post-competition transitions. Tessa nods politely, and Jeff gives them both a thumbs-up.

“I hope it’s okay that we’re doing this here, that I didn’t assume,” she says, as Jeff is resetting the camera and they’re heading toward the boards. “I just thought, you know…”

“No, no,” he says, quickly, reddening slightly. “I get it. Former ice dancer and all that. It makes for a nice, full-circle story, I’m sure.”

She chuckles.

“Besides,” he says, getting serious as he shoves his hands in the pockets of his puffer. “I like meeting my clients here. It’s home turf for them, so to speak. Puts them at ease sometimes. And if you grew up at a rink, like I did, you can never really let it go.” He surveys the space, as if he’s looking for something and doesn’t quite know what it’s supposed to be. “All of them smell the same, you know.”

“Rinks?” she asks, her lips quirking upward in a smirk.

“Yeah.” He laughs. “Ice and sweat and something I can’t ever put my finger on. But it’s the same everywhere.”

They end up leaning against the boards, side by side, her elbow bumping up against his where they both rest across the chipped red plastic. He’s watching the skaters as they glide across the ice, his head nodding in time to the music filling the rink from the sound system. It’s some kind of tango and she doesn’t recognize it right away.

She should be watching the ice too and she’s acutely aware of Jeff three feet to her left, camera trained on the two of them, but she can’t seem to look away from Scott. She’s fascinated by the way he watches the ice, his head moving with the skaters as they glide, the twitch in his arms, the bend in his knees like he yearns to move with them. She thinks it’s probably a little like how she watches ballet, now that it doesn’t crack her open, exposing still-unhealed wounds, reminding her that they can do what she no longer can. 

“Sometimes,” he says, turning his head slightly towards her, though still facing the ice, “I forget that I’m here for their heads and not their step sequences.” 

She can’t help but move her hand, placing it reassuringly over his. Despite the chill of the air around them, his hand feels warm under hers, and she doesn’t want to let go anytime soon. She’s silently letting him know she gets it. That despite loving what they do now, where they ended up, there will always be that part that misses where they started.

(This will end up being the exact moment they need; her editors will eat it up, and she knows they don’t need to film anything more.) 

As Jeff is packing up his equipment, Tessa manages to steal a moment alone with him. 

“I can’t believe you!” she whispers, through gritted teeth so it comes out more like hiss. 

“Do you not want to go out with him?” Jeff asks, simply, wearing a smug smile that she wishes she could wipe off his face. “Have some other pressing plans, Tess?” 

“No...I...just…” She’s stumbling over her words, tripping on her own thoughts, and she feels more like an awkward, bumbling teenager than she did when she was an  _ actual _ teenager. 

“Exactly,” Jeff says, like she’d actually managed a coherent answer to his question. “You’ll thank me when I'm the maid of honour at your wedding.” 

“Jordan will be maid of honour,” she replies, ignoring his implication. 

“Man of honour, then,” he says on a laugh as he walks away, out of the rink and toward the van.

* * *

The café Tessa (or should he say Jeff) ended up choosing for them is halfway between the rink and his office, which Scott thinks is actually quite convenient, all things considered. Not that spending more time with Tessa is in any way  _ inconvenient _ and god, he’s getting off track here. It’s just that he seems to lose all semblance of cool when he’s around her; it’s like all his senses are on high alert and his heart is beating so wildly in his chest that he’s sure everyone around him must be able to hear it too.

He doesn’t understand what she does to him, he just knows, instinctively, that he wants more. Which is why he’d so readily agreed to Jeff’s suggestion, and spared no thought to the fact that it was  _ awfully convenient _ for her camera guy to be needed somewhere else on the day of their shoot. Earlier, when they’d stood elbow-to-elbow at the boards, he could have sworn there was some sort of spark passing between them, an electric current thrumming through his veins that reached a fever-pitch when she placed her small hand overtop his.

Now, as he walks next to Tessa on their way to hot chocolate, he can’t help but notice the faint chill in the air and the way her cheeks and nose have gone rosy. He thinks it’s the most endearing sight. His hand is practically itching to reach out and tuck an errant wisp of hair behind her ear, to slot itself into hers, to squeeze and never let go.

But he knows he shouldn’t, knows he can’t, that this is strictly professional and Tessa is coiled tightly like a spring right now and he’s worried that if he changes anything about the status quo she might burst. So he just shoves his hands deeper into his pockets and tries to make idle small-talk about the weather and the Leafs until they enter the café and have to queue up to place their orders.

Once they’re sitting, Tessa gets out a camera and her phone and takes some pictures and something she calls a boomerang (she tells him it’s a thing on Instagram and he nods and pretends to understand even a word of what she’s saying) but pretty soon the pictures are done and then it’s just them, two cooling paper cups of hot chocolate resting on the table between them.

“Thank you,” she says again, and he looks up from his cup, where he’d been fiddling with the sleeve and slowly shredding it to pieces. “The pictures and video should turn out great.”

“Of course. It was fun, honestly,” he says, smiling. It really was. He’d been fascinated with the process from start to finish, and he counts himself lucky to have had a behind-the-scenes introduction to her world.

She takes a sip of her hot chocolate, brow furrowing, and he wonders what’s going on in that brain of hers. She unlocks her phone to check the time, and he can practically hear the gears spinning in her mind. “I think I actually have everything we need,” she starts, and there’s an apologetic look on her face for a split-second that she expertly schools into a smile. “And I just remembered I have to be in the office in… a half hour,” she says, doing the math and grimacing slightly.

“Not a problem, I should probably get back to my own office at some point too.” He tries as best he can to hide the disappointment of having to watch her go.

As she’s gathering up her things, she tells him that she’ll email him photos and the link to the episode when it goes up in two weeks. “And would email be best for any follow-up questions?”

He decides to take his chance right then and there. He wants to see more of her, and he hopes she wants to see more of him. “It’s, uh, it’s probably easier to get me via text,” he says, praying that she’ll catch on.

“O-okay.” She looks like she didn’t expect this at all, and he wants to kick himself, but then he notices her look of surprise has made way for a barely concealed smile. She hands him her phone. “Here. Just, uh, type your number in, and I’ll shoot you a text.”

He does as told, and their hands brush for the briefest of seconds as he hands it back. She presses some keys, and sure enough, his own phone pings. 

**_Hey, it’s Tess_ **

“Got it,” he says, stupidly, and smiles when she laughs.

“I heard.”

As he’s saving her number as a new contact, he doesn’t even realize words start tumbling out of his mouth like loose change, filling the gap between them. “Feel free to text me if you ever need anything, by the way.” He blanches, backtracks, his face growing bright red. “You know, neighbour stuff, all that. Mrs. Johnson is really particular about how the hallway should look around the holidays, I can give you some insider tips,” he stammers, awkwardly.

Tessa giggles. “Neighbour stuff, huh? Hopefully not involving bats?”

Scott just groans.

She places a hand on his arm and pulls it back just as quickly, blushing hard. “I was just kidding. Thank you, really. It’ll be nice to know there’s someone I can text.” She checks the time again and faintly mutters what he think might be  _ fuck. _ “I really do need to get going. I’ll see you around, Scott.”

He smiles. “Yeah. See you around, Tess.”


	4. the (gradual) realization

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're still blown away by the response to this fic, thank you so much for all the feedback and support! This chapter has some more pining (we're basically growing a forest, tbh) and two exasperated best friends.
> 
> Thanks a million to only_because3 for reading this over. Enjoy!

**_Still hate you!_ **

Tessa types the text to Jeff as she’s slumping down on her couch at a little after 7 pm, sore and exhausted. Tossing her phone onto the cushion next to her, she leans forward to rub at her shins. After her brief hot chocolate with Scott, she’d had to stop by the CBC and then, still filled with a restlessness she couldn’t quite explain, she decided to try out an advanced modern dance class taught by an old friend. It’s been a while since she danced; her legs aren’t used to two hours of intense movement like that anymore and they ache like they haven’t in years. 

She’s contemplating the merits of peeling herself off the couch — it’s a really comfortable couch, so soft and grey and she sinks right into it — to get ice packs when her phone starts ringing next to her. 

“My legs hurt, I am _so_ not in the mood,” is her greeting to Jeff. 

“Was it that bad?” he asks, laughing under his breath. She immediately knows he’s not talking about the class.

She sighs, still massaging her legs and running her thumb over the small scars on her shins. “No. I mean… I felt like an awkward teenager and that was dumb, but no, it was fine. Nice even.” She has to admit there was something that felt relaxed and right about sitting across the quaint café table from Scott, sipping a frothy hot chocolate — even if her cheeks felt perpetually flushed and she found herself tripping over her own words. “We exchanged numbers.” She blushes at the thought, at his fumbling and the shy little smile on his lips when he’d taken her phone.

“I knew it! You got his number, I was totally right!” She can hear Jeff’s giddiness practically bursting through the little speaker in her phone. 

“No,” she rushes out. “You were not! It’s just easier that way… you know, for any further communication.”

She thinks that’s what Scott had said, but right now everything she’s feeling is so muddled that she doesn’t remember who was the one who suggested exchanging numbers in the first place. She knows that’s what she’d been hoping for, when she’d brought up the best way to get in touch, but she thinks he’d been the one who actually asked for her number. Though he never responded to her, **_Hey, it’s Tess_ **message. Not that she expected him to, really. There isn’t much for him to say. He doesn’t need to do anything more for the podcast, unless somehow parts of the interview need to be redone (which has never happened to her). She may never actually need to use his number. 

It’s good to have anyway, she thinks, even if she never uses it. They are neighbours after all, and it’s nice to know how to reach him, just in case. It could come in handy on the off chance there ever is a real burglar (or ghost) in her apartment, or god forbid she does more than just drop a pan on her foot and give herself a nasty bruise. (When she first moved in by herself she kept having nightmares about slipping and falling and not being able to get up, with no one to come help her.) It’s comforting to have a quick and easy way to contact someone who lives so close. Just in case of emergencies, she tells herself. Nothing more. Just neighbourly stuff.

She explains all this to Jeff. 

“Tess,” Jeff says, and she can tell by the tightness in his voice that he is straining not to laugh. “I think you getting laid is a pretty big emergency.” 

“Jeffrey!” She cannot believe he just said that. “I am not… I don’t need… Jeff! My love life is none of your business.” 

“Tess,” Jeff starts, his tone mildly exasperated, as if she were a small child not understanding a simple concept. “It _is_ my business, whether you like it or not, when we inevitably end up on your couch with wine and brownie ice cream every few months watching _Mamma Mia!_ or _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ and after three glasses you admit, under great duress, that _it's been a_ _while_ and then you get mopey and I have to put you to bed and it's an experience I would really not like to keep repeating for the rest of my adult life…” She hears his groan through the phone line. “Listen, Scott seems great… just, I dunno, live a little.” 

Tessa sighs into the phone, the sound comes out louder than she expects and she knows he must hear her as he huffs out his own sigh in response. And it’s not that Jeff is wrong, necessarily. It has been a while, a long, long while and longer still since she was in an actual relationship. But she’s been busy and even the idea of dating seems exhausting.

When she pitched her podcast to the CBC three years ago, and insisted on doing most of the producing and editing on top of hosting, she knew what she’d be getting herself into. It’s a lot of work. But she’s just started her third season of a monthly podcast where she has almost full control (she of course still needs certain approvals and to submit to the CBC editing chain) and she’s been able to make a bit of a name for herself. So, having no time for a love life, she thinks, has been completely worth it. She’s done well being happily single for this long; she doesn’t need a cute neighbour to scratch an itch or whatever it is Jeff is thinking. Besides, he’s an upcoming guest on her show, it would be inappropriate. 

And it’s not even like she likes him. She doesn’t know him well enough to make that kind of judgment on him. Even if when she closes her eyes she sees his looking back at her, their unique shade warm and inviting. She thought his eyes were dark, a deep brown, when they first met — him at her door, bat in hand — but they were this light honeyed brown when he sat across from her in her studio during the interview, the soft afternoon light filtering in through the window. And when she’d looked at them today, under the harsh, bright lights of the rink, they were this wonderfully earthy green. 

Still, she doesn’t like him. Even though she swears she can hear his voice in her head and finds herself wanting to hear more of it. She wants to ask him more questions, to talk to him about more than just sports psychology and a failed ice dance career. They made a good team, she thinks, remembering their interview and how good their back and forth had felt. Maybe she could see about doing a series with him. It could be great in the lead-up to the Olympics to have a sports psychology series. She makes a mental note to write the idea down. In the meantime, she thinks she will just go into the studio, put on her headphones, sit in her comfy chair and listen to the recordings. She hasn’t listened to the entire thing back yet and needs to start editing it soon. 

She hears another sigh, followed by, “I think I just lost you there.” Damn. She’d nearly forgot that she was still on the phone with Jeff. He chuckles. “Night Tess.” 

“Sorry, I’m tired. I was just thinking that I should go relax, probably start listening back to the podcast and get an idea for how I want to edit it.”

“Only you think work is relaxing, Tess,” Jeff laughs. “And one day you’ll admit I’m right. Then you’ll thank me.” 

“Bye,” she says, with a little shake of her head. “You’re still wrong.” 

Tessa hangs up, still shaking her head at her phone. This whole day has been a little bit absurd; not in a bad way, it’s just been a lot (she still can’t believe Jeff) and she is so tired. She could probably easily just flop into bed now and be asleep in a half an hour, but she finds she’s actually got herself looking forward to listening back to her interview with Scott. She’s already smiling to herself, her conversation with Jeff and the pain in her legs almost forgotten, when she glances down at her phone to find her messages already open. 

She clicks open the chat with Scott, even though she knows that it has nothing more than her own text to him. Maybe she could thank him? Before she has a chance to think, before her brain fully registers what her thumbs are doing, she’s typing out another text. 

**_It’s Tess again. I just wanted to say thank you one more time for meeting with me today. I’ve had such a great time talking sports psych with you!_ **

She hits send before she rereads and wants to kick herself. Of course, he knows it’s her, why did she start with **_It’s Tess again_ ** _?_ She closes her eyes and rubs her temples, willing herself not to freak out. It’s fine. She’s definitely an idiot, but it’s fine. 

Just before heaving herself up off the couch to head into the recording studio to hide and pretend she didn’t just text Scott like a lunatic, she sets her phone to _do not disturb._ She figures that way she will be less tempted to send yet another text apologizing for the ridiculousness of the first one. 

* * *

Scott got back to the office in a bit of a daze that afternoon, and Chiddy had taken one look at him, shaking his head, and told him that they were gonna get beers after work that night, because he has _questions_ and he wants answers to them. Scott hadn’t had the energy to protest, so a few hours later, he’s in a sports bar nursing a beer, picking at the label with his thumb.

There’s a game on, though he’s not paying it any attention, but he hopes that it’ll somehow distract Chiddy enough to spare him an interrogation. (He knows it won’t.)

Scott knows that Chiddy knows he’s been on Tessa’s podcast, because he actually gave Scott tips and talking points, generally being the more organized of the two. Chiddy also knows that Scott did a promo video shoot with Tessa, and, because he’d hopped on Google as soon as he found out his best friend was being interviewed, he knows that Tessa is, in his words, “really hot.”

What Chiddy doesn’t know is that Tessa is Scott’s next-door neighbour, that he nearly accosted her with a bat not too long ago, that he stole her wifi, and that ever since he met her the second time, he hasn’t been able to take his mind off of her. (Granted, Scott is trying to ignore that last bit himself, so he’s had his reasons for being hesitant to mention it.) 

Still, it really shouldn’t come as a shock when Chiddy takes a swig of his beer, places a hand on Scott’s arm and goes: “Dude, what’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Scott says, going for nonchalant and missing the mark by about ten miles when his voice goes half an octave higher than it’s naturally meant to. “I’m fine.”

“Like hell you are,” Chiddy counters. “What happened today?”

“Nothing, we just did the promo stuff and got hot chocolate!”

Chiddy snorts. “You got hot chocolate?”

Scott blanches. It had been Jeff’s idea, and Tessa had needed the Instagram photos and god, why does he feel the need to justify his actions to his best friend. This isn’t fair. He tells Chiddy as much, and, when his friend’s eyes crinkle with mirth and a sly smirk spreads across his face, he vows to never, ever tell him anything ever again.

“You like her,” Chiddy says plainly, like it’s as obvious as the sky is blue.

Scott scoffs and focuses on the beer label, shredding it into tiny strips and making a pile on the bar in front of him. He doesn’t say anything though.

“Ha! I knew it!” Scott groans and Chiddy barrels on. “Are you gonna see her again? Do you have her number?”

He doesn’t know how to explain this, how to tell his best friend that yes, he’s probably gonna see her again in the hallway (and hopefully see her again for coffee or lunch sometime) without explaining the whole thing from start to finish. But doing that would be like handing Chiddy two years’ worth of stuff to lord over him on a fucking silver platter, wrapped up in a bow. He has a feeling that this time, Chiddy will be listening to him with rapt attention — so very unlike when he regales him with stories from beer league hockey. Fuck.

“Well, it’s kind of a long story…” he starts, a flush creeping up his cheeks.

By the time he’s done, Chiddy is howling with laughter on the stool next to him, and there are honest-to-god tears in his eyes. Yeah, Scott is _never_ living this down, ever. “You thought she was a _ghost?”_ says the man whom he formerly considered his best friend, but who is now getting far too much satisfaction from his considerable pain to merit the title. “Dude, what the hell?”

“I never said it was my finest moment,” he says, rolling his eyes. “And I apologized, many times.”

Chiddy, who’s still cackling with glee, quirks a brow and smirks. “Uh huh,” he says, “did you _apologize_ over a glass of wine and some… attentive assurances that you in fact know just how real she is?”

Scott nearly chokes. “No!” he sputters out, shaking his head. His and Tessa’s relationship is professional, cordial, _neighbourly_ at best. Nothing more. Honest. “We’re just neighbours, Chid,” he says, and he hopes he sounds convincing. Going off his friend’s knowing look, he’s probably not doing too well.

“Sure,” Chiddy says, taking a deliberately slow sip of his beer. And then he asks the question Scott’s been dreading all night. “But do you want it to be more?”

The problem is, he wants to say yes. He wants to chase the high of the feeling he got when her hand covered his, when they lost themselves in a conversation for hours and he felt like he’d been talking to her for his whole life. He wants to get to know her, find out what makes her tick, if she has a ticklish spot right below her ribs. He wants to study her, catalogue her, memorize and explore. 

He wants to spend afternoons in her company talking about everything and nothing at all, wants lazy Sunday walks in the sunshine, to try his hardest to get her to love the Leafs even half as much as he does. He wants to find out if her hand will fit in his as well as he imagines, what he has to do with his tongue to make her skin prickle. He wants to know what it’ll take for her to fall to pieces below him, what makes her moan and what she sounds like when she forgets her own name.

He wants to know her, and he _wants_ her.

But he has no idea if she wants the same.

Chiddy’s teasing has made way for sympathy once ten seconds pass and Scott still hasn’t given an answer. He smiles, shaking his head. “You really like her, eh?”

Scott lets out a wry chuckle and nods. There’s really no point in denying it.

“She’s… she’s brilliant, Chid. She’s smart and funny and she’s unlike any other girl I’ve met and I just… I want to get to know her. She’s special.”

It feels good to get the words out, Scott realizes. It feels good to admit it to himself and sit there with his feelings out in the open. This way it’s tangible, and something he can work with. 

(He’s currently thanking his lucky stars for his psychology degree — and for the fact that he somehow made it through grad school despite never being the bookish kind as a kid. It really has helped him sort out his life an annoying number of times. Also, grad school got him to UofT and Toronto, and it’s where he met Chiddy, which, nine days out of ten, he knows is a good thing. He’s still holding out a verdict for tonight though.)

Chiddy grins, slamming his hand down on the bartop in what Scott assumes is a little bit of alcohol-induced enthusiasm. “Man, I say go for it,” he says. And then, with a laugh: “I mean, we all know how well online dating worked out for you. This is a step up. Remember when you got Tinder and spent three weeks living as ‘Scitt’ because you made a typo and your bio was ‘My name is actually Scott but I can’t change it’?”

Scott cringes. That period in his life is a time he’d like to forget, thank you very much. It’s not like he’s bad at getting girls, is the thing. He’s actually quite good at it, if he can say so himself; the long list of uni flings is plenty of evidence to prove it. (They’d started in second year, when his body had taken pity on him and finally acquiesced to the last stages of puberty.)

His problem is that although he’s got the skills for picking up a girl — at bars, or the library, or once, in what he still considers his most impressive one-night-stand, his dental hygienist, whom he had successfully asked out right after the fluoride rinse — he kind of loses all of his supposed swagger as soon as a phone is involved.

Once he’d gotten the “Scitt” situation sorted, he’d swiped right on a few girls. The conversations had been awkward, to say the least, undoubtedly due to the fact that he didn’t realize how _forward_ Tinder could be. It’d intimidated him, and he’d been too stressed trying to come up with good one-liners to actually make anything work.

He really thinks he might be cursed.

“Actually,” Scott starts, and it really is paining him to admit this, “my wifi name right now is _Sorry My Thumb Slipped Won’t Happen Again_ and I don’t remember how to change it back.” As soon as he’d successfully managed to apologize to Tessa via network name and hit enter, all knowledge of how exactly he’d accessed those settings had left him. In one ear and out the other, so to speak.

Chiddy chokes on his beer in earnest this time. “Jesus Christ, dude,” he manages. “If you don’t know the context, that’s horrible. Please, for the love of god, make it something else.”

Scott’s about to say he’ll try but can make no guarantees when his phone vibrates in his pocket. He gets it out as Chiddy starts focusing on the very much neglected game on the bar’s TV, and immediately feels his lips pull into a smile when he sees the name on the screen. It’s from Tessa, and she’s thanking him again for the podcast, and he doesn’t realize he’s full-on grinning till Chiddy jabs him in the shoulder and gives him a knowing look.

“It’s her, isn’t it?”

He’s ripped out of his daze, and looks up at his friend, faintly bewildered. 

Chiddy just smiles and shakes his head, chuckling. “Man, you’ve got it bad.”

“Shut up, Chid.”

He stares at the message for a long time, trying to think of something to reply with that’ll adequately convey his enthusiasm and not be weird. He has no idea if she feels even a fraction of what he does, and he doesn’t want to risk spooking her. Hell, he did enough of that the first time they met.

Eventually, he settles on a message, and holds his breath as he presses send.

 **_It was so great to talk to you too! Thanks for having me on. Next time you’re at the CBC_ ** **_maybe we could grab lunch together? I know a place right between there and my office_ **

Once he sees the little “delivered” symbol, he signals the barkeep for another round of beers and two shots of tequila. Chiddy snorts.

* * *

Tessa is sitting in the cozy armchair in the corner of her studio, her feet up on the ottoman, head back, eyes closed, and headphones on while she listens to her interview with Scott. It’s the first time she’s gone back to listen to it. She likes to let interviews sit for a few days, maybe a week, before she starts the editing process — it helps to take a step back from the immediacy of the interview and listen to it with fresh ears. 

She started out sitting up in her chair, her laptop perched on the armrest, her legs crossed, taking notes — jotting down minute marks where there is dead air and she can easily cut the audio, or particular moments she wants to listen to again. But after a while she became so enraptured with her own conversation with Scott that she’d put down her pen and notebook and allowed herself to sink into the chair and close her eyes, focusing solely on listening. 

They sound as good together as she felt they had. After a few awkward moments at the start — where they were both still processing the whole neighbour, wifi, bat debacle — they find an easy rhythm together. She prides herself on her ability to make her guests feel comfortable, like they are chatting with a friend and not an interviewer, but she doesn’t think she’s had a guest who opened up so quickly and so easily, nor one she found herself warming to as fast as Scott. She hadn’t noticed it at the time, all the little bits of herself she’d shared with Scott during the two hours they spoke. She usually gives an anecdote here or there, a little story to help relate to her guests, but never more than that; she never wants to peel back too many layers of herself, to feel vulnerable. 

But she can hear the emotion seeping into her own voice while they talk about potentially career-ending injuries and the help that athletes ought to be getting in order to deal with the outcome. There is one point in the conversation where she hears herself explaining to Scott how powerless she felt dealing with her injury, in a way that she’d never spoken about it to anyone else, yet she’d felt comfortable enough with him after only an hour. She thinks this is probably part of what makes him so good at his job.

“I felt like my body had failed me,” she said. “Like I was a failure. It was especially bad before there was really an answer to what I was experiencing, and at nineteen it felt like maybe I just wasn’t strong enough, or tough enough, or good enough.” Her own voice sounds soft and a little sad as if drifts from her headphones.

“You’re incredibly tough,” Scott’s voice answers, confident. “I’m so proud of you; you’ve come so far and done such amazing things, and that requires incredible strength.” She can picture the way he smiled at her, his hand reaching across the table to touch hers. “You’re an amazing woman, Tessa Virtue.” 

She can feel herself blushing under his praise, even though this happened to Tessa of four days ago. She’s shaking her head, just like she had then, looking down, away from him and his gaze that had made her feel...wanted, appreciated? She knows what she’s about to say, remembers the words before they play out on the recording. 

“I’m not that amazing,” she’d said. 

“Yes, yes you are,” Scott’s voice plays in her ear. “I don’t think I would have binged two full seasons on your podcast in a day and a half if you weren’t.” 

She pauses the recording, then skips back a few seconds on the track to zero in on the quote. She listens again. And then one more time. Each time she feels her heart skip a beat or two when he says, “You’re an amazing woman, Tessa Virtue.” 

There’s something about the way he says it, the genuine awe in his voice, the way his tongue curves around the sounds of her name, maybe just the words themselves, that make her want to hear them from him again and again. She imagines them differently too. She imagines how they would sound soft in her ear, as he gently brushed her hair out of the way. How the words would feel against her skin as he repeated them, lips moving, against her neck, along her collarbone, down the smooth expanse of her sternum…

_Oh fuck._

She takes off her headphones and closes her laptop. Fuck. This cannot be happening. It isn’t happening. Nope. It’s just been a long time and goddamn Jeffery Buttle has been putting ideas in her head. She closes her eyes again, rubs at her temples, then the bridge of her nose. It doesn’t help. All she sees is Scott from this afternoon, looking wistfully out at the ice, his hand warm under hers. She sees his soft smile, the one he seems to sport anytime he looks at her. She hears him saying he’s proud of her, saying she’s amazing, and she shivers. But she finds that she wants to say it right back, to tell him she’s proud of him, to shake him and tell him to stop underestimating the importance of his work. 

She wants to kiss him and tell him he’s amazing too. 

God-fucking-dammit. She likes Scott Moir. Her wifi-stealing, baseball bat-wielding neighbour, Scott Moir. Her podcast guest, Scott Moir. 

_Her podcast guest._

A professional whom she interviewed, professionally, for her job. Someone who she not more than two hours ago thought she might want to interview again — do a little series with. A totally, completely inappropriate person to have a crush on. Even more so inappropriate to imagine naked in her bed, kissing his way down her body…

She needs to get out of this room immediately and go to sleep. She has to stop thinking about Scott like that, at least until the podcast is out in just over two weeks. She breathes in deeply, a measured inhale, followed by an exaggerated exhale, before stepping out into the hall. 

That’s when she hears him, his whisper-yelled, “Fuck,” travelling through the thin wall between their apartments. It sounds raspy, sounding to her a bit more sensual than she thinks it truly was — probably because her thoughts have been where they absolutely ought not to be. 

She pulls her phone out of her back pocket to check the time and that’s when she remembers she’d set it to _do not disturb_ a few hours ago. She flicks it back off and a second later a text appears on her screen, from Scott. He answered her. 

**_It was so great to talk to you too! Thanks for having me on. Next time you’re at the CBC_ ** **_maybe we could grab lunch together? I know a place right between there and my office_ **

She’s immediately conflicted. A part of her, a very big part of her to be exact, wants to say yes immediately and meet him as soon as possible and get lunch and talk and then follow the road all her thoughts have led her down tonight. But the rational part of her mind, the _I’m a professional journalist and he’s technically a source_ part balks at the idea, because it wouldn’t be proper, it wouldn’t be right. (At least not until the podcast is out.)

In the end, rationality loses and Tessa reminds herself to yell at Jeff the next time she sees him because surely this is all his fault somehow. If he hadn’t mentioned her dry spell, or sent them for hot chocolate, or told her he thinks Scott is cute… well, then she wouldn’t be sitting here, typing out a message telling him when she’s free for lunch.

But he did, and now she can’t stop thinking about Scott and it’s late and before she knows what she’s doing her thumbs have betrayed her — again — and she’s texted Scott back.

**_Lunch sounds great, I’d love to pick your brain some more. I’m at the station every Monday._ **

* * *

He stumbles home late that night, having had one beer too many with Chiddy in the end. He hadn’t been out drinking in a while, and once the grilling about Tessa was over, he’d actually enjoyed himself.

(The alcohol had also been a good distraction from the fact that his message to her is still unanswered. She doesn’t have read receipts on, so he doesn’t even know if she’s seen it. He can’t decide whether it’s better not knowing or seeing the little timestamp and waiting for a response.)

Once he locks his door behind him, he trips over a pair of runners in his entryway, letting out a colourful expletive as he fumbles for the light switch. He rubs his toe and sort of hops down his hallway on one leg, idly wondering if Tessa, one door over, heard him. He hopes not.

He makes it into the kitchen and pours himself a glass of water, downing it in one go. He’s not twenty anymore, and he’s learned over the years that dealing with hangovers is as much about prevention as morning-of care. Groaning, he pads to his bathroom and curses Chiddy, tequila and the very greasy poutine they’d decided to treat themselves to.

His insides are already protesting.

While his body starts dealing with the toxins he’d experimentally thrown at it, Scott checks his phone again. It’s still frustratingly free of notifications. He scrubs one hand over his face and sighs, deciding that a shower is in order and might actually help him feel like a real human again.

Fifteen minutes later, after spending about ten of those under the spray agonizing about Tessa, Scott wraps himself in a towel and begrudgingly admits that he does feel a bit better. He sits down on the edge of his bed and presses his phone button one more time. This time, there’s a notification.

He pumps his fist and whoops.


	5. the (not a date) first date

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In today's edition of pining idiots: lunch, which may or may not be a date. We'll leave it up to you to decide.
> 
> All our thanks goes to only_because3 for reading this over. Enjoy!

Tessa gets to the restaurant Scott suggested at exactly five minutes to twelve on Monday. It took her eight minutes to walk from the CBC studio at a brisk pace and she’s starting to sweat in the early October sun — or that could just be from her nerves. She stands in front of the café for a moment or two, taking in few fortifying breaths. _It’s just lunch,_ she tells herself, _it’s not a date_. It’s just lunch between two people who have worked together, who enjoyed working together. A business meeting, if you will. 

He certainly doesn’t have to know about how hearing him say her name as she played the recording over and over again last week sent shivers through her, making her breath quicken, her heart beat erratically. He doesn’t need to know that she could listen to his voice all day, think about how it curls carefully around each syllable and hits each consonant. Or that she imagined how it would sound in her ear, as he’s whispering sweet nothings while his hands map her body. 

He doesn’t need to know any of her completely inappropriate thoughts that were spurred by relistening to his interview. Or that maybe it’s more than that, that she finds him a little bit ridiculous, and a whole lot charming, and she wants to learn more about him, more than just his career and connection to sport.

He certainly does not need to know that Friday night she could have sworn she heard him through the wall, a _whoop_ piercing through the quiet of her apartment — and that a smile had spread across her face as she thought that maybe, just maybe, that cheer was for her and her text. She knows that’s ridiculous, that he was probably watching sports recaps or something, but she spent the rest of the weekend with the idea floating around that there is a chance he is just as excited to see her again as she is to see him. 

A gust of wind brushes past her, a cool breath against her sweat-dampened skin, making her shiver. She pulls her cardigan more tightly around herself before pushing open the door of the café. It isn’t a place that she would have picked on her own; it’s a little too _green_ for her taste. The café clearly caters to the Whole Foods-shopping, vegan type, but it looks cute. 

She likes the modern vibe; the long light wood tables with metal chairs and potted succulents between every four seats and low hanging decorative lights are fun and inviting. A waitress approaches and seats her at the end of a long table in the center of the bright, open space. On the far wall, there is a list of on-tap kombuchas and gin concoctions and there are a whole lot of green drinks with what appears to be actual grass in them that she instantly passes on. 

When the server comes back with a jar of water and two glasses she settles on ordering an almond milk cappuccino and it’s just as the server is retreating that Scott arrives.

He’s in a button-down shirt and dark-washed jeans again, a navy jacket slung over his arm. He smiles as soon as he spots her and she could swear the whole room brightens with it. It fills his whole face and his genuine happiness to see her makes her lose her breath for a moment or two as he approaches the table to sit down across from her. 

“Hey T,” he says with another smile gracing his lips, this time soft and meant just for her. 

“T?” she questions, running the nickname over in her mind, thinking about the way his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth as he pushed out the hard consonant sound, somehow managing to make it sound soft, delicate even. It’s just a name, not even that, no more than a single letter but her treacherous mind — with this giant crush that doesn’t seem close to fading — is telling her it means more. Like it’s a gift from him to her.

She shakes her head because she’s being ridiculous and his face blanches. “Is that okay?” he asks, voice hesitant. 

It is. It’s more than okay, she thinks, but all she can do is nod and manage a, “Yeah, it’s okay.”

His smile is back and he pulls one of the menus towards himself. It’s nothing more than a small wooden clipboard with a few pieces of cardstock: one with a list of drinks, the next a small handful of main dishes and finally, dessert. She watches with interest at the way his brows raise, nearly to his hairline, and his eyes widen as he takes in the selection. She nearly snorts trying to hold back a laugh when she thinks she sees him mouth _what the fuck_ at the drinks menu. 

“You’ve never been here before, have you?” she asks, this time unable to suppress a small giggle. 

He looks back at her, his hand reaching up to run through his hair. “Uh, no,” he starts. “But a bunch of my athletes are always raving about it… especially the dancers. I, um, I just thought…” he stammers, pulling at his collar. “I didn’t know it would be so…” He’s desperately trying to find the right word, she can see how his face scrunches in concentration. 

“It’s good, Scott,” she smiles at him, hoping it’s comforting. It really is good. She thinks that he could have picked an 80s-themed diner with a failed health inspection rating and she’d still be happy to be sitting across the table from him. “It’s really cute here. Besides,” she says, glancing at her own menu, “they have banana chocolate pancakes.” They are vegan, made with almond flour and walnuts, but it’s still chocolate, bananas and pancakes. Who could say no to that?

She hears him breathe a sigh of relief and it’s endearing how worried he seemed that he’d picked the wrong place. She assumes that when his dancers — she supposes he means ice dance — recommended it, he thought of her, and that makes her heart flutter in her chest; she can’t help but be just a little bit enamoured by how genuinely sweet and thoughtful he seems. She gives herself a minute to look at him, watching her in return, and smile. 

“Chocolate fan?” he asks, after maybe a few too many beats of silence. 

She nods. “I may have a bit of a sweet tooth, chocolate is my kryptonite. Especially Lindt, I love those little Lindors.” 

He nods, tilting his head like he’s caching that information away for later. She imagines him showing up at her door with a bag of chocolates after she’s had a long day, and then he’d probably offer her a massage...

Luckily her mind isn’t able to wander any further, as the waitress approaches with her cappuccino and asks if they know what they’d like to order. She orders her pancakes and Scott orders a coffee and then she’s fairly certain he picks his food off the menu at random, not knowing what half the options actually are. It makes her laugh, and when the waitress retreats he starts laughing with her. 

“I’m not entirely sure if what I ordered is a salad, or a soup… maybe it’s some kind of sandwich… I know it has avocado in it, and something about purple carrots and beetroot,” he says, pouring himself a glass of water and shrugging. 

She laughs even harder, can feel the sound bubbling up inside her and spilling out. “It’s okay, even if it’s inedible, I promise to share my pancakes,” she says, and finds they both immediately stop laughing. She wants to take it back, that maybe that was too much for a first date that is definitely not a date. _It’s not a date,_ she reminds herself, for the tenth time today. 

She is _not_ on a first date with a guy she maybe likes, a lot. She is having lunch with Scott, a guest from her podcast. She’s become friends with other guests. She’s had coffee with Anastasia before, she gets the occasional lunch with Guillaume and Heather, she’s had beers with Mike Babcock and his wife before. This is totally normal, completely the same. 

* * *

Scott freezes. Did she just say she’d share her food with him? Did that really happen, or has his mind somehow entered an alternate plane of existence and started imagining things? Because, honestly, he’d buy it at this point.

He’s sitting in a vegan, pseudo-hippie café where the menu could be written in Greek for all it’s worth, and across the table from him is the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. Yeah, he might’ve ascended.

The silence they fell into right after she suggested they split her pancakes in case of culinary disaster brings him back to earth very quickly. He lets out an awkward cough and Tessa blushes deep crimson, pushing an invisible strand of hair behind her ear. He almost reflexively reaches across the table to help her but stops himself just in time. _Close call there, Moir._

“I’d hate to steal any of your chocolate,” he says, trying to get back to the lightness of before. “And if it’s terrible, I’ll finally have proof for my juniors that not everything they see on Instagram is as cool as they think it is.”

Tessa lets out a laugh at that and he grins. The tension between them dissolves again, and he’s glad for it. As much as he’d love to barrel right on with it, to go from zero to a hundred without everything in between, he’s sensed over the past week that Tessa needs time for these kinds of things.

She’s reserved and quiet, and though it took them no time at all to get a conversation going during the podcast, he senses that slow and steady might be the right tactic here. He doesn’t want to rush her into anything, and he’s willing to take it step by step. She’s worth it. 

Right now, that step looks like admitting he’s truly out of his culinary depth and laughing about it, and honestly, it’s so fun and comfortable that he doesn’t mind one bit. Since the server took their menus, they’ve been trying to guess what Scott will be eating based solely on what he remembers.

Tessa thinks it’s some kind of bowl concoction, and Scott is secretly hoping he gets a burger-esque thing solely because that’ll mean carbs and he’s really not sure he’ll be full otherwise.

“What if the avocado is sliced like a burger bun?” Tessa muses, and Scott groans internally. Why in the world did everyone suddenly decide avocados were somehow this godly food? He likes them as much as the next guy, honest, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever get the hype. “Maybe with a beetroot patty? I’m pretty sure saw it on Instagram, there’s this café in Amsterdam dedicated to avocados.”

“Am I allowed to say that I really hope it’s not?” he says, scrunching up his face in disgust. Tessa bursts out laughing and he just shakes his head.

“Tell me about your clients,” she says instead. “You have mostly skaters, yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s a good mix but with the TCC so close I do get a lot of them,” he says. “Helps that I know the sport. We kind of find our sweet spots in terms of who we can relate to best.” There are a good handful of sports psychs in his office, and they have varying backgrounds that make them more or less suited to work with certain athletes. His colleague Greg has taken on a lot of runners, Sophie is great with swimmers and Alex has a good number of soccer and basketball players. Toronto has enough athletes for all of them to see their fair share.

Tessa hums and nods. “I sometimes wonder how the end of my career would’ve gone if the ballet had made me see someone.” She shrugs and fiddles with her spoon. “But it’s been so long now that I don’t even know…” She trails off and his heart breaks a little for her.

“I think that you handled a difficult situation with grace and perseverance in a way few people can,” he says. It’s the truth; he’s still amazed at how strong and determined she must’ve been — still is to this day.

She smiles a shy little smile and blushes. “Thank you.” Then her face changes and he can tell she’s trying to steer them back to safer ground. “I think our food is coming,” she says, with a smirk.

He laughs. “Well, here goes nothing.”

Tessa looks far too smug when the server sets down their plates and Scott’s does end up being a bowl filled with quinoa, purple yams, beetroot, purple carrots and other things he can’t quite identify. The pièce de résistance is an avocado rose — somehow, the restaurant had managed to fan out the slices so they look vaguely like a flower and topped it with sesame seeds.

The pancakes sitting across from him look decidedly more _normal_ and he doesn’t think he could tell they’re vegan if he didn’t know. Tessa catches his longing gaze and giggles, casting her eyes over to his bowl. “It’s very… purple,” she says, biting back a laugh.

“You could say that again.”

Despite the fact that his food is mostly purple, it’s actually pretty good, which is something Scott has to begrudgingly admit once he takes a few bites. Tessa, for her part, seems pleased with her pancakes, and Scott is happy that his Gen-Z inspired restaurant selection worked out after all. 

“My sister would love it here,” she says between bites. “She’s definitely the more on-trend one of the two of us.”

“Does she live around here?” Tessa never mentioned siblings, and he’s intrigued.

“Yeah,” she says. “She’s a lawyer and a barre instructor. Her firm is just a few blocks from here, actually.”

“Are you close?” 

“We are,” Tessa says. “She’s just a few years older than me, it’s nice having her so close. Do you have siblings?”

“Two brothers, both older,” he answers. “Let’s just say my ma never had a shortage of cooking and cleaning to do when we were growing up.”

She laughs. “I have two older brothers too, but they’re a lot older so they were already off at university when I was still pretty young.”

“I’m sure your mom was glad for a quieter house,” he says, and Tessa chuckles.

“It was quiet until they got home during breaks with bags of laundry and I came back from ballet school and insisted on practising in the basement and blasting Swan Lake on the stereo.”

“I’m half-convinced my parents own an ice rink just so they had a place where my brothers and I could burn off all our energy growing up.” Honestly, it would’ve been a smart move on their part, and on Aunt Carol’s. All the Moirs are of the rambunctious kind. “It’s still chaos when we’re all back for visits. Last time, Charlie and I were playing a game of pickup hockey—”

He gets into the story, gesticulating wildly just like he had when he’d regaled it to Chiddy. Except for this time, his audience is giving him her full attention and if he’s even more enthusiastic than normal when telling his tale, well then sue him.

(Later, he wonders if she really is that into hockey or if she feigned interest on his behalf but he finds he can’t really bring himself to care whether or not it’s the latter. It’s endearing either way.)

He’s at the point where Charlie is midair, sailing across the rink and Tessa is laughing so hard she has tears in her eyes. Scott, meanwhile, is nearly bursting with glee. 

“And that,” he concludes, “is why you never let your older brother decide on the terms of a bet.”

“Noted,” Tessa says with a smirk. “I’ll have to keep that in mind. With sisters, it’s more of a balance between you wanting to copy everything they do and them bossing you around because you don’t know any better.”

Scott laughs. “Your sister would get along _fabulously_ with my cousin Cara. She didn’t care that we were boys, she just bossed us all around anyway.” 

Tessa leans forward and answers in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’ll make sure to never give them each other’s numbers.”

The conversation during the rest of their meal is similarly light, and Scott finds himself amazed at how easy it is for them to fall into a rhythm together, for conversation and laughter and banter. It’s much easier than it’s ever been with a girl, and he relishes the feeling. He doesn’t feel the need to put on any airs in front of her, it’s like he can just be himself and that’s all she’s expecting from him.

Tessa, in turn, is opening up more and more, and she’s wickedly sharp and funny when she wants to be. And when she can actually land the punchline of her jokes. When he teases her about her delivery, she scowls at him from across the table.

“You think I need to work on my jokes?” she says. “Oh, it’s on, Moir.”

Scott smirks. “Uh huh, Virtch,” he replies, trying the nickname on for size. “You should know that all good puns are like bananas — they have to be a-peel-ing.”

A beat.

And then, completely deadpan: “And what about bad puns?” 

Well, Scott thinks, he really can’t argue with that.

He offers to take the bill but she stares him down long enough that they end up going Dutch and he makes it a personal goal of his to get lunch (or coffee, or dinner) with her as many times as it’ll take for her to let him pay the cheque whole. (And then, if she’ll still see him, he wants to make it many more.)

“And the pancakes were really okay?” he asks, as the server brings their cards back. He’s still a bit worried about the choice of food. It seems like she liked it, but that could just be her politeness shining through.

“They were great, honestly,” she says. “I’m glad your purple bowl was good too.”

He chuckles. “It’s not really my type of food, but I was pleasantly surprised. I’m more of a steak-and-potatoes guy myself.”

“Well, then next time,” Tessa says, her eyes sparkling, “I know a really great burger place down the street.”

Scott grins.

* * *

Tessa spends the rest of Monday at the station completely distracted, thinking about her lunch with Scott. She can’t stop smiling, keeps remembering little things he said — like his story about playing hockey with his brother — and has to suppress her laughter. She finds herself blushing at the mere thought of him looking at her like she’s the only person in the room, or at the way his hands flexed around his coffee mug, imagining how they’d feel on her skin. 

She fumbles her way through her production tasks only half-focused — which, as anyone who knows Tessa Virtue at all could confirm, is very, very unlike her. She’s extremely glad she had all her meetings in the morning, before lunch, and doesn’t have to bumble her way through talking to her editors and senior producers right now. That she doesn’t have to pitch ideas this afternoon when she can barely form coherent thoughts that aren’t _Scott._ She just has to manage to get through one longform news recording and then she can go home.

Jeff definitely notices how flushed and flustered she is when she passes him in the hall. 

“You should really review Friday’s footage,” he says with a smirk. “I think everyone will love all the heart eyes.” 

She rolls her eyes and makes a point to avoid him, and his gloating, for the rest of the day. Because it wasn’t a _date._ Though, if it had been, it would have been a good one, she thinks. Her best first date in a long time, maybe ever.

She’s never been a big “dater.” When she was young and in ballet school full-time, her training took precedence over everything else. She didn’t have the time, nor the desire to date. She didn’t want a significant other, she wanted to be the best. She wanted to secure her spot in the corps and then work her way to principal. She’s always been like that, very goal-oriented, and dating, she felt, got in the way. Then her ballet dreams had to be put away, boxed up and tucked into the very farthest corner of a closet, only to be taken out and looked at as distant memories. Her career was over and she was alone. Then she went to university and found out that she was actually just really _bad_ at dating. Too awkward, too introverted, too focused on doing well at school… And now it’s years later and things haven’t really changed. She’s focused on her career, and besides, most nights she would much prefer a relaxing soak in the tub with the accompaniment of the rich characters of the novels she loves, a glass of wine and a bar of dark chocolate. 

It’s been over a year since she’s been on a first date, and that had been a disastrous set up by her (well-meaning) meddling sister. Before that, her last date had probably been more than two years ago, with her ex, just before they broke up. Her last good date was well before that, sometime early in their short-lived relationship. She doesn’t even remember anymore. So, she’s surprised by how easy and how enjoyable her lunch with Scott was. Or, maybe she isn’t. Because it wasn’t a date. Maybe she just can’t do dates? It was just lunch so the pressure was off and she found herself relaxed and opening up, laughing with him, making jokes and occasionally landing her delivery. 

The thing is, she wants it to have been a date. But she knows it can’t be. She can’t date Scott. It’s wrong, it’s crossing some sort of weird work boundary (he’s on her podcast). Not to mention he’s her next-door neighbour, which could get awkward fast when it doesn’t work out. Risking it all for what — a little crush? It is just a crush, isn’t it? 

She has two weeks until his podcast interview airs. Two weeks to sort out her feelings for him. Two weeks to ignore her feelings (and maybe him) in hopes that they will go away. Two weeks and then they can be friends, be neighbours — she could use more friends, especially one as funny and kind as Scott seems to be. _Two weeks_ , she tells herself. She just needs to get through the next two weeks without him consuming her every thought. 

It seems like such a simple task. Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is a drop in the bucket. What could possibly happen in two weeks? It will be easy, she thinks. She even manages to banish him from her thoughts the entire time she sits in the CBC recording studio, headphones on, the only sound filling the room her own voice, consumed by her reporting. _It will be easy._

She believes it until the moment she gets out of the elevator in their shared apartment building, her low heels clacking against the ceramic tile. She has to pass his door before reaching her own, something she previously overlooked. It’s always just been another identical door in the long hall, ten feet away from her own, but now she knows it’s _his._ And she notices all the little details that make it uniquely Scott’s. 

She notices how the three in 314 hangs crookedly; it’s missing the bottom screw. She smiles at the fall wreath hanging on the door, surrounding the peephole. It looks homemade: red, orange and yellow scraps of fabric cut into the shape of maple leaves, threaded onto a bent coat hanger; it’s very similar to the one that hangs on Mrs. Johnson’s door on the other side of hers and she wonders if the old woman made it for him. It’s a little crooked too, and she can’t help but smile at it and think that it is just so Scott, to hang this lopsided, handmade wreath on his front door to celebrate fall. When she looks down she notices the Toronto Maple Leafs welcome mat, worn out from years of use.

She’s stopped outside his door, standing in the middle of the hall, wondering if he’s behind it. Has he gotten home from work yet? Would he already be starting on making himself dinner? Or maybe he’s kicked off his shoes and is lounging on his couch. She wants to reach out and knock on his door, if only to see him just once more today. But she won’t. She can’t. 

She shakes her head and realizes she should stop staring at his door when she hears her phone buzz in her purse. She steps over to her own door before pulling it out. She has two texts, the first from her sister, the other from Scott. 

She reads the one from Jordan first, while unlocking her door. 

**_Sorry Sam, I can’t make the game Thursday night. One of the girls at the studio is sick so I have to teach a barre class :(_ **

Tessa frowns as she’s reading the message. She was really looking forward to hanging out with Jordan, having a girls night and going for dinner and drinks before catching the Leafs game. Mike Babcock had sent her tickets for Thursday night’s game as a thank you for a little article she wrote commending his coaching style and commitment to skills rather than enforcement, and the practice implements he puts in place to help avoid injuries. 

She doesn’t want to go alone, but her oldest brother Casey is busy with his family, Kevin is too far away and Jeff hates hockey — and hockey players. She doesn’t have many friends in Toronto, at least not many who are into hockey, or plans that aren’t made at least a week in advance. She resigns herself to the fact that she’ll probably have to give the tickets away to someone at work, until she opens the text from Scott. 

She shrugs out of her sweater and lets her bag fall to the ground in her front entry as she reads it. 

**_Thanks for grabbing lunch with me T, I had a great time._ **

She thinks of the awestruck look in his eyes when he spotted her picture with Babcock in her studio, his excited smile when he talked about her interview with him. She thinks about _Leafs4Eva_ … 

She shouldn’t, should she?

* * *

Scott had a mountain of paperwork to get through after lunch, and then a session with a junior pair of his: Isabelle and Sebastian, who are currently either at each other’s throats over the littlest disagreement or making heart eyes at one another from half a rink away. He can’t decide which is worse for them, but he does know that working with them doesn’t make him yearn to be a teenager again. (And it most definitely leaves him feeling eternally grateful for and in awe of his mother, who somehow managed to deal with three of them, all at once.)

Consequently, he only has time to process lunch with Tessa when he gets home that night and lets his coat and bag fall in a heap at his front door. Beer is currently higher up on his list of priorities than hanging up his things, and it’s only when he slumps down on his sofa and takes a sip that he lets out the breath he was inadvertently holding and remembers that he never texted Tessa to say _thank you._

Scott’s mother always taught him the importance of _please_ and _thank you_ and holding open doors and offering up his seat on the train and he’d be damned if he were to disappoint Alma Moir in a situation like this.

His lunch date with Tessa — which he really, really hopes she thought of as a date too — is the best date he thinks he’s been on in years. For all his ability to pick up girls and get laid, Scott hasn’t been in a serious relationship for a while. He dated a girl when he was in grad school who’d been training to become a physiotherapist, but since she moved to Alberta he’s been about 90 percent single. But maybe, just maybe, that’ll change soon.

Despite the fact that he hadn’t recognized a good chunk of what he’d eaten for lunch, he’d had a great time with Tessa. She’s whip-smart, sharp and funny, and he thinks he could talk to her for hours and not get bored.

He digs his phone out of his pocket and sends her a quick thank-you text and then peels himself off the couch to throw together some dinner, leaving his phone sandwiched between two cushions. When he retrieves it fifteen minutes later to queue up a playlist, he sees a notification from Tessa. He smiles, unlocking it with his thumb.

**_Thank you for the invite! I have two tickets to Thursday’s game and my sister can’t make it, are you interested?_ **

Scott grins. It seems Tessa had enjoyed whatever today was too, at least enough to see him again. And he’s always up for a Leafs game, especially if Tessa’s involved.

**_Babsy got me the tickets and assured me the seats are to die for._ **

Scott almost drops his phone on the ground.

Wait, what?

He can’t believe he’s reading this right. Tessa’s offering him a free ticket to Thursday’s Leafs game. Tessa’s invited him to a Leafs game. Tessa got two tickets to a Leafs game from Mike Babcock. If he goes to this Leafs game with Tessa, he will be going with a ticket that was personally acquired by Mike Babcock. Tessa knows Babcock well enough that he gives her tickets to games. Scott is now one degree of separation away from Mike _fucking_ Babcock.

_What the fuck?_

He takes a deep breath and tries not to hyperventilate. This isn’t even a question. _Of course,_ he’s going. He’ll jump at any chance to see Tessa again, and you don’t say no to Babsy. That’s sacrilege. Now the only thing that’s left to do is find a reply that doesn’t give away just how much he’s freaking out inside and hitting send.

**_That’s amazing, T! Of course I’ll be there! Thanks for thinking of me._ **

And then, because he can’t help himself:

**_Should I wear my Babsocks to mark the occasion? ;-)_ **


	6. the (perfect) hockey game

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, we don't understand hockey, at all. We know you're not here for the play by play of anything but the Scott and Tessa pining, and neither are we. All hockey-related mistakes are ours, and we probably don't know how to fix them (sorry). 
> 
> But we hope you enjoy this chapter regardless and focus in on the feelings and not the pucks and sticks!
> 
> All our thanks to [ladyfriday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyfriday) for the Scotiabank Arena help, to Twitter and Google for the hockey explanations and to [only_because3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/only_because3) for reading this over.

Scott is outside Scotiabank Arena a full ten minutes before he’s supposed to meet Tessa there, and it might be the earliest he’s ever shown up to something that wasn’t an emergency. Tessa told him she’d meet him at the venue, saying she had some late meeting at the station and would be coming straight from work.

He, on the other hand, had finished work early that day, which meant he’d had plenty of time to sit in his apartment and figure out what to wear and mull over all the different ways this evening could go in his head. It hadn’t helped his nerves at all, because, by the time he’d arrived, he’d thought about at least ten catastrophic endings to tonight.

She could think he’s way too into hockey and that he never talks about anything else and that he’s no good for conversation; she could throw a drink at his face if he whoops too loudly; he could accidentally step on her foot if he’s not paying attention and break her toe… basically, there are a million ways this evening could end that aren’t the Leafs winning and Tessa kissing him and a personal invitation from Mike Babcock to the locker room before the next game.

(Yes, he did also think about some best-case scenarios when he was choosing between two different pairs of jeans a few hours ago. He likes to think himself an optimist.)

In the end, Scott had pulled himself together, thrown on a pair of dark wash jeans, a subtle Leafs shirt (he’s gonna support his team, but he doesn’t want to be obnoxious about it) and, of course, the Babsocks. He promised Tessa he’d wear them, after all.

Now, he’s standing outside, his hands burrowed in the pockets of his puffer jacket, looking out for Tessa. He’s excited for tonight, has been ever since she texted and he nearly lost his mind about the fact that Babsy got her tickets and she’d offered  _ him _ the spare. But now, as the start of the game creeps closer, he realizes that the actual game is only a fraction of what he’s looking forward to.

Most of all, he’s excited to be spending more time with Tessa, regardless of where she wants to go. He thinks he’d go to a performance of  _ Swan Lake _ at the National Ballet if she asked him to, or some opera where he’d be in the dark for hours on end with people singing at him in Italian, wearing powdered wigs. He shudders a little at the thought and thanks his lucky stars that what they’re actually doing is this.

It’s pretty perfect, if he’s being honest, seeing his favourite team playing with the girl he can’t keep out of his mind.

Speaking of — an Uber pulls up in front of the arena and Tessa steps out, looking a little bit (a lot) frazzled. She shuts the door and it takes her a second to spot him but her face immediately brightens a bit when she spies him. Scott, meanwhile, grins and waves.

She’s still wearing work clothes, he realizes, because she’s avoiding the puddles on the street in dainty black ankle boots and her coat may be black and woollen but he’s not sure how much it’s helping in the cold. When she gets close enough to wave back and say “hi,” he notices that her hair is falling out of the bun she pinned it up in and her brow is furrowed.

“Hey,” he says, standing there a bit awkwardly. He doesn’t know whether or not to hug her, or shake her hand, or do nothing at all. “You get here okay?”

Tessa lets out a snort. “I’ve had a day,” she says, shaking her head, and then, realizing she never said hello properly, she says “hi” and gives his arm a squeeze before rummaging around in her tote for the tickets. They make their way to the arena and she regales him with the tale of her endless meeting gone wrong and her coworker, Zach, who’s apparently a pain in the ass and with whom she’s being forced to co-produce a story for an upcoming show.

Scott can only sympathize — annoying colleagues are the worst and he’s glad that being a sports psych means he mostly works alone with his clients — and pretty soon, they’re waiting to get their tickets scanned and enter the arena.

It’s the first time he takes a second to actually  _ look _ at his ticket and his eyes nearly bug out of his head when he does. When she said that Babsy assured her the seats were to die for, he was expecting great seats, sure, but he wasn’t expecting  _ this. _ They’re in the lower bowl, just rows from the ice, right in perfect view of a goal. 

These seats aren’t just to die for, they’re “hand over a limb and your firstborn child” seats. (Not that he’d ever do either of those things, but you get the point.) They’re fucking incredible.

When he says as much to Tessa, she just laughs and shrugs. “It’s Babsy, he has his ways.” Scott nods, because there’s nothing else to do except pretend that yeah, sure, that’s a normal thing to say and follow along.

The Leafs are playing the Oilers tonight, so the arena is a sea of blue, white and orange. Once they successfully locate their seats, Tessa excuses herself to go to the washroom — she spilt coffee on her blouse today, she says, with a frown on her face, and it didn’t help her already crappy day — and Scott says he’ll get them each a beer. He also stops by the merch for a minute to get her a pair of Babsocks, because he figures it’s the least he can do in exchange for a free ticket.

When he comes back, beers in hand and socks in his back pocket, his eyes grow as wide as saucers for the second time that night and his throat is suspiciously dry. Tessa has somehow procured a Leafs jersey from somewhere and is now sitting in her seat, wearing it and a pair of slim black trousers. It’s a men’s jersey, he notices, and more than a few sizes too large for her petite frame, but she, wearing that, might be the hottest thing he’s ever seen. (He doesn’t even let himself think about what she might look like if it were the  _ only _ thing covering her slim figure.)

He gulps and tries valiantly to regulate his breathing.

“I got you a beer,” he manages, when he slides into the seat next to her. “And you got a jersey?” He’s trying to stay nonchalant and failing spectacularly.

She laughs. “Yeah, that coffee stain was never going to come out before I wash it, and my brother’s been wanting this jersey for ages. I figured I’d pick it up for him now and bring it home with me later.”

Scott just nods, having somehow lost all capability for coherent thought.

The first period passes relatively calmly. The Leafs make some impressive saves and the Oilers manage to get a goal in, but overall, it’s a standard game of hockey. Scott’s impressed by how much Tessa knows about the sport, and she laughs and says growing up with two older brothers will do that to you. Scott has to agree.

They spend the first few minutes of the break chatting about their respective workweeks, but then Tessa perks up beside him and waves. Scott follows her gaze and his heart stops. Literally. 

He thinks he stops breathing for a bit there too, because the person who Tessa’s waving to, who’s standing right by the rink and the hall that leads to the lockers, is none other than Mike Babcock.

_ Holy fuck. _

Tessa moves to get up and grabs his hand to pull him along with her and Scott’s brain is going delightfully blank. Somehow, mercifully, his body doesn’t betray him and he follows her on what he thinks is autopilot, until he’s mere metres away from one of his childhood heroes. 

Scott has loved hockey all his life, and he’s always loved the Leafs the most. He remembers being nine years old and explaining to his family very matter-of-factly that he was going to help them win the Stanley Cup one day, and looking forward to his hockey practice after Aunt Carol said his skating lessons were done, racing to the boards as fast as he could to switch his figure skates for a hockey stick. 

His stone hands and natural proclivity for deep edges may have prematurely ended his hockey career, but there was Leafs bedding in his room until he went off to university and even now, his love for the team shines through in every corner of his life. He didn’t name his wifi network  _ Leafs4Eva _ because he couldn’t think of anything else.

So being right across from Mike Babcock? Only actually winning the Stanley Cup would top that.

Tessa hugs Mike like they’re old friends (which he supposes they are) and thanks him for the tickets before taking a step back. “Mike, meet Scott Moir,” she says, gesturing between them. “Scott, this is Mike.”

Babcock holds out his hand for Scott to shake and Scott truly has no idea how, but he manages a, “Nice to meet you, sir,” and a smile without completely stumbling over his words. Truthfully, it’s taking most of his brainpower to just keep breathing, and he’s not entirely sure he isn’t dreaming right now.

“You a Leafs fan, son?” Babcock asks, raising one eyebrow.

“Born and raised, sir,” Scott replies, and the other man smiles.

“Wouldn’t want to hear anything else.” He looks between him and Tessa before turning to her. “Tell your sister I said hi,” he says, “and that I hope her case went well.”

“I’ll make sure to let her know.” 

Babcock smiles before looking at the clock. “I’ve gotta run, but thanks for coming out tonight.” 

“Good luck with the rest of the game,” Tessa says, “and thanks again for the seats.”

“Of course,” Babcock says, before he turns to Scott with a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye. “You’re one lucky guy, kid. She’s a keeper.”

And with that, he takes off down the hall, leaving both Tessa and Scott entirely stunned.

* * *

Scott is still leaning over the rail, his hands gripping tightly around the metal so he can position himself as far over as safely possible. He’s staring down the hall leading to the change rooms, watching Mike’s retreating form. Tessa, in turn, is staring at Scott, attempting to process Babsy’s last words as he started walking away from them.  _ She’s a keeper _ . She can feel the heat rising in her cheeks, and she hopes that the chill of the arena is enough to explain away her crimson blush. 

She’s not sure if she should say something to him. Should she try to explain it away? What could she say:  _ Oh, he must have assumed we’re dating because I never bring guys to things…  _ but that would likely not help. She opens and closes her mouth a few times, ready to say something, but no sound comes out. She bites her lip and tucks her fingers inside the cuff of the too big jersey. Besides, he’s still facing away from her, even though Babsy has long gone into the locker room now. 

“So, that was Babsy…” she says eventually, trying to act casual and regain his attention, leaning over the rail herself, just to be a bit closer to him. She’s pretty sure he might be in a mild state of shock — what with how she’s pretty positive she heard him muttering, “Babsy’s tickets… tickets from Babsy,” when she gave him his ticket earlier. 

He turns back to face her then, his eyes wide, smile even wider, she can practically feel the excitement radiating off him in the way he shakes his arms. It’s endearing; he reminds her a bit of a puppy. 

“That was Mike Babcock!” he says, his voice rising and nearly cracking at the end. “I just shook Babsy’s hand… Babsy called me kid… he hugged you! You hugged Mike Babcock!” 

She laughs a little at that, because to her it has become the norm to greet Mike with a friendly embrace whenever she happens to see him (which isn’t actually all too often). But she does remember being a bit awestruck the first time they met when she interviewed him for CBC when he first joined the Leafs, then again for her podcast. Mike’s a great guy, and looking up at Scott — who is blinking rapidly and looking around like he’s making sure he isn’t dreaming — she’s pretty glad she could help him meet his idol. She feels a flood of warmth starting in her chest and spreading through her all the way to her toes at having played even just a little part in his happiness. 

The thing is, Scott Moir’s happiness is infectious. He grins at her and bounces on the balls of his feet and she can’t help but grin right back at him. She smiles so wide her cheeks hurt and it makes her break out in an excited laugh. She wants to get to see him this happy all the time — which was something she was not supposed to think about. But the more she looks at him, takes in his genuine excitement at being here, maybe specifically at being here with her, it makes it harder and harder to not think of this as a date. Which it is not. Can’t be. Nope.

She had done a great job  _ not  _ thinking about it all day. She’d scheduled a meeting today at the CBC studio on purpose so that she’d have an excuse to meet him at the arena, rather than come together. Since they live next door there were only so many excuses she could come up with to not have him knocking at her door, walking shoulder to shoulder with her to the elevator and sharing an Uber with her here. That would have made it feel much more like a date. 

A  _ date  _ which she largely ignored all day, not hard considering how her day went. Her meeting was delayed, and then ran late, Zach gave her several headaches and then she stepped in a puddle getting into her Uber, spilled her latte on her blouse (which is now balled up in her purse and probably beyond saving), so it was very easy to not think about Scott. Until she saw him and his damn infectious happiness. 

“Should we head back to our seats before the period starts?” she asks, just to stop thinking, and staring, and smiling like some dopey idiot, really. 

He nods, still looking pretty blissfully dazed. “Yeah, yeah that’s a good idea. Sorry,” he says, as she starts to lead the way back to their spots. “I feel like this has happened in my dreams before. But this is real, right?” 

She laughs and nods before settling herself into her seat. “Very real,” smirking a little to herself at the throwback to the first time she met Scott. 

“Mike’s right, I really do feel like the luckiest guy right now,” he says as he takes his spot next to her. She freezes, halfway into her seat and she’s frozen. She thought they were ignoring that. She’s ignoring it at least. She looks down at the ground, the feeling of warmth returning to her cheeks, her chest. She starts to cough on air as she sits the rest of the way down. 

“I mean,” Scott fumbles, “great game, good company and Babsy… the Leafs don’t even need to win.”

She coughs again, focusing on their feet, and she can feel Scott shifting in his seat next to her. She needs to say something to break the tension. It’s just then that Scott moves again and she catches sight of his socks for just a second. 

“Babsocks!” she nearly shouts in her excitement to change the subject. 

“Huh?” Scott sounds a little perplexed at first, before letting out a big booming laugh. It shakes her seat and makes her look back up at him. He hikes his pants up to show off his socks. “Yeah! I promised I’d wear them.”

“I love them!” she says, laughing, and he’s smiling at her and the brief tension disappears. It gets drowned out but the sounds of the Zamboni, the buzz of excitement around them, the sound of his own answering laugh. 

The people in the neighbouring seats haven’t returned from the intermission yet and she watches the Zamboni as it circles the rink, leaving a trail of fresh ice in its wake, before looking back at Scott with a smile of her own. This feels nice, being here with him. She likes going to games with Jordan, but usually, they go have a few drinks first and sometimes she can find the energy of the arena overwhelming. 

“Oh!” Scott says suddenly. “I almost forgot.” He shifts onto one side in his seat and pulls something out from his back pocket. She notices the red flush as it creeps up his neck to his cheeks before he hands her an exact match to his own Babsocks. “I got these for you.” 

She takes them in her hand and examines them, Maple Leafs blue, with white stripes and a crude cartoon of Mike Babcock’s face; she really does love them. “Thank you, but you really didn’t have to get me anything,” she says, hoping it doesn’t come off as ungrateful, she just really didn’t expect him to get her anything. 

“You gave me a free ticket to see the Leafs and introduced me to Mike Babcock… a pair of socks is the least I can do,” he shrugs, and runs a hand through his hair. 

“Well, thank you.” She smiles at him and then before she can stop herself, “Next time we can match.”  _ Next time?  _ Did she really just say next time? Dammit, Tessa, get your shit together, she thinks. She tries to think of a way to deflect. “I’m glad you’re having a good time. There is this guy down the hall from my apartment I was thinking of asking instead,  _ Leafs4Eva…  _ but I don’t know if he would have bought me socks, he stole my wifi once.” 

Scott freezes, his eyes going wide in shock before he bursts out into a laugh so big it shakes her chair. He’s shaking his head, his hair sweeping over his face, before he stops and pushes it out of the way. “Hey, that’s me,” he says, once his laugh has shrunk itself down into a little shoulder shake. “It might be lame, but it’s true. Leafs forever!”

She nods, biting her lip to hold back her own laugh that wants to escape. “I have to say I like it better than  _ Sorry My Thumb Slipped Won’t Happen Again _ .” 

“I really am sorry about that...It was an honest mistake...I…my...” he’s stumbling over his words, just like the first time he’d tried to apologize for it and it’s kind of cute how worked up he’s starting to get, even though she’s clearly not mad about it — not anymore at least. 

“Your thumb slipped? So you’ve said...or your wifi did at least,” she finishes for him, raising her eyebrows and smirking at him. 

“Yeah...well not really...but I really didn’t mean any harm.” He’s really starting to seem worried again. 

“It’s fine,” she laughs, putting a hand on his arm, it’s warm under her touch, despite the chill of being in an arena and she really, really wants to keep touching him, so she keeps her hand there. “It makes for a pretty good story.” 

“Yeah,” he says, eyes cast downward to where her hand is still on his arm. “Yeah, I guess it does.” He doesn’t seem quite convinced, his voice low and quiet, his ears still touched pink. 

“Did I ever tell you about my other neighbour? Tried to save the building from a ghost… using a baseball bat.” She smiles at him, rubbing her hand up and down his arm, like it’s a reflex she really can’t control. 

He laughs again at that, finally looking back up at her, and she swears she can see a twinkle in his eye — but that’s probably just the bright lights. “That sounds like another really good story,” he says. 

And with that, the Zamboni has left the ice and the players are coming back out and the seats around them have filled back up without her even noticing. Like they were in their own little bubble, just the two of them. It amazes and scares her in turn how she feels like that with him, that in a building full of people she forgot about everyone but him. 

The buzzer goes off to signal that the game has started up again. She tries hard to turn her focus back to the ice, but finds herself struggling to pay attention. She loses track of the puck more times than she has her eye on it, instead absorbed in the feeling of Scott’s eyes on her. She can sense him in her peripheral leaning forward slightly, his elbows resting on his knees, and even though she doesn’t dare look at him — because she’s afraid of what she’ll see — she just knows that he is looking at her and not the ice. 

_ Two weeks,  _ she tells herself as she almost completely misses the moment that McDavid scores on the Leafs, even though she was looking right at the play. She needs to somehow make it two weeks, just two weeks then she can look at him and see if he is looking at her like she thinks he is. Once the podcast is out. 

The rest of the period passes in much the same way, though after the Leafs score their own goal she finds it a bit easier to get back into the game. It seems Scott finally has his eyes on the ice, too, as he cheers loudly beside her. 

As the period progresses, Scott makes some asides to her about the game, commenting on the players with little tidbits she never knew. She’s always been a Leafs fan, grew up with hockey-playing brothers, but she can’t say she ever paid enough attention to know the whole roster, or their trivia. Scott, however, seems to be a wealth of information. A veritable Toronto Maple Leafs encyclopaedia. She enjoys listening to him spout off facts about players when they have the puck — their scoring record for the season, who’s recovering from injury…

Twenty minutes seems to pass by in a flash and the buzzer for the next intermission is ringing out through the arena. 

“Want another beer?” Scott asks as the people around them file out towards the concourse. 

It’s then that her stomach growls, and she hopes that the noise around them is enough for him not to have heard. She missed her chance to grab something to eat on the way to the game because of her meeting running late, and she’s getting pretty hungry. “Actually, maybe a hotdog, if the concession line isn’t too long,” she says. 

They walk out together and he gets in line at the nearest concession counter while she quickly runs to the washroom. By the time she gets back out, the line for the women’s room longer than the line for food and beer, but he’s already juggling two beers and two jumbo hot dogs, waiting for her. They head back in with their drinks and snacks just in time for the final period to start. 

The Leafs lose. It’s a close game and the Leafs had the Oilers outplayed for the entire third period. But they lose by one goal. It’s a spectacular goal, one Andersen had no chance of saving, but it’s a loss all the same. 

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to see them win,” she says, as they are waiting behind a sea of people to climb the stairs and make it back out onto the concourse. 

“It felt like a win to me,” Scott says, leaning in close, his arm brushing against hers. “Tonight was perfect.” 

* * *

They walk out of the stadium into the night, shivering slightly as the wind hits them. It’s chilly out, but not unseasonably so, and he thinks a walk would be good to clear his head right now (and work off the beers he drank too). Besides, it’s not too far, and they’ll save money if they don’t Uber.h

Normally, this would be the part of the date — he’s gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s one, because that would make tonight even more perfect — where he and the girl duke it out about who’s going home where and if he gets to walk her, but in this case, they’re both going to the exact same place.

“Wanna walk back?” he asks instead, looking over at Tessa with a smile. She’s bundled up in the jersey and the coat she was wearing earlier, and she’s dug a pair of gloves and a scarf out of her work tote. 

“Sure.”

They settle into a comfortable silence for the first few blocks, falling into step with one another and letting the chill sober them up again. He only had two beers and she had two as well, but he thinks the rush of being at the game with her tonight and getting to meet Babcock was enough to leave him buzzed.

“Thank you again,” he says, clarifying when she peers at him over the top of her scarf. She’s burrowed her nose into it and it’s one of the most adorable things he’s ever seen. “For the tickets, I mean, and for introducing me to Babsy. That was wild.” He lets out a little disbelieving chuckle and she squeezes his bicep through his coat.

“Thanks for coming with,” she says, as a reply. “You’re like a walking hockey encyclopaedia. It’s very useful to have on hand.” He swears she winks at him, but it’s too dark to really tell, and he grins all the same.

“One of my many talents,” he quips. “That, and rapping the entirety of Alphabet Aerobics.”

(He learned the whole song once, on a dare from Charlie, and he has to admit he’s pretty damn good at it.)

She snorts. “Seriously?”

“Yes!” He throws his hands up before turning around to face her, walking backwards on the sidewalk. “Want me to prove it to you?” She’s got a disbelieving look on her face and it only motivates him more.

“Okay, here goes. Now, expect to have your mind blown.” He mimes a tiny explosion with his hands and she bursts out laughing before her face turns mock-serious again and she motions for him to begin. He smirks and takes a deep breath.

“Artificial amateurs aren't at all amazing. Analytically, I assault, animate things. Broken barriers bounded by the bomb beat. Buildings are broken, basically I'm bombarding…” 

By the time he’s done, they’ve made it to the next intersection and he’s nearly out of breath. Tessa’s eyes have gone wide and when he finishes the song — “Zig zag zombies, zoomin' to the zenith. Zero in zen thoughts, overzealous rhyme Zea-lots.” — he bows down in front of her. 

“Told you so,” he says when he’s caught his breath, and Tessa claps, clearly impressed.

“I should never have doubted you,” she says with a laugh. His heart does a weird fluttering thing at that, and he can’t help but smile in her direction. The street they’re crossing is empty, and fairly small, and they check it twice before taking the chance and jaywalking.

They’re halfway across the crosswalk when a car speeds toward them, having somehow appeared out of nowhere. Scott thanks his lucky stars that skating and hockey have helped him hone his reflexes, and he quickly grabs Tessa’s hand and practically yanks her onto the other side of the street.

Once they’re back on the sidewalk, they’re both breathing heavily. He notices, with a start, that their hands are still entwined, but she’s made no effort to separate them and he likes the feeling of her small hand in his too much to do anything about it either. Somehow, they just  _ fit. _

“You okay?” he asks, looking over at her with concern in his eyes. She’d been the one closest to the car, and he thinks she probably wouldn’t have noticed it until it was too late. It scares him to even consider the possibility.

She nods, her eyes blown wide and her breath still shallow, and she calms down a little when he gives her hand a squeeze. (His chest warms at the realization.) “Thank you,” she manages after a few seconds, leaning her head on his shoulder in a brief reprieve.

“It was nothing,” he says, sheepishly. He scratches at the back of his neck with his free hand. “I guess I’ve still got good reflexes.”

She laughs, but it’s a dry, hollow sound. “Add that to your list of talents.”

He quirks an eyebrow at her. “You’re sure you’re alright?”

“I’m fine.” She pokes her head out from her scarf so she can flash him a small smile. “Honest.”

He nods, taking her at her word, and they set off again toward their apartment building. She doesn’t let go of his hand, and he doesn’t release hers either and he’s glad it’s night and the darkened streets mean she won’t see the blush that’s creeping up his neck and cheeks at the fact. 

“Got any plans for the weekend?” he asks a few blocks later, to break the silence. He’s planning on driving to Ilderton to see his parents and meet Charlie and the kids there.

She hums. “Jordan and I are heading back to London,” she says, absentmindedly adding, “We’re taking the train tomorrow night.”

Before he even has time to realize what’s happening, he’s said, “I could drive you guys,” and Tessa has stopped dead in her tracks on the street. (She still hasn’t let go of his hand though.) “I’m heading back to Ilderton this weekend and it’s on the way.”

Her face is equal parts shocked and confused and she’s already going on about how it’s far too much trouble and they couldn’t possibly impose and…

“It’s really no big deal, Tess,” he says, “and besides, road trips are much more fun with company.”

She looks like she’s mulling it over, thinking the whole thing through in her head and he almost holds his breath. It had been a split-second decision but the more he thinks about it, the more perfect it seems in his head — and he hopes that’s not just the beer talking. He’s pretty sure it’s just his traitorous heart.

After what feels like an eternity, but is probably just a few seconds, Tessa squeezes his hand. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah, I’d love to have the company.”

She waits for a beat and then nods. “Okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scott raps [Alphabet Aerobics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D5iyKXZcUQ) by Blackalicious.


	7. the (interrogatory) roadtrip

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *taps mic* Is this thing still on?
> 
> We're back with another chapter, and apologize for the delay. Life, work, uni and travel hit us hard this month but we've missed these two dorks and are thrilled to be back with the roadtrip chapter. Sisterly interrogations full steam ahead. Once again, all our thanks to only_because3 for helping us stay sane and editing this. Enjoy!

“Listen,” Tessa says, cradling her phone between her shoulder and her ear as she does one last sweep through her apartment to make sure she’s turned everything off. “It’s not a big deal Jo. He’s just my neighbour and we’re practically going to the same place.” She waits a beat while her sister  _ uh huhs  _ and adds a _ whatever you say Tess. _ “He’s really nice. You’ll like him.” She hopes she will at least. “He’s a sports psych for Team Canada and he was on my podcast...it’s...there’s nothing going on. I swear.”

She hears her sister chuckle through the phone as she triple-checks her weekender bag. It’s not like their mom won’t have anything she’s likely to have forgotten, Tessa just likes to be prepared, and she needs to do something with her hands while she attempts to convince her sister — and maybe herself — that there is nothing between her and Scott. It’s a task she’s apparently been failing at.

Jordan has, of course, been texting her with a variety of questions, ranging from:  **_So how long have you known this Scott?_ ** to  **_If he’s so great, why haven’t you slept with him yet?_ ** It’s been ongoing since Tessa messaged her last night after the hockey game to let her know about the slight change in their travel plans. It’s gotten to the point that Tessa has been very close to calling Scott to thank him for the offer but let him know they’ll be taking the train anyway. But she doesn’t like the feeling that brings up in her either; it’s like she craves seeing him. She’d miss him over the weekend if she didn’t see him at all. 

She thinks of the feeling of her hand in his last night, as they walked back to their apartment building after the game. His grip was firm and warm around her hand, strong as he pulled her toward him to avoid being hit. She hadn’t even seen the car coming until she was colliding into his chest and it was whipping around the corner only inches behind her. Her heart was beating so painfully fast in her chest she felt her ribs wouldn’t be able to contain it. She was dizzy, disoriented. She doesn’t think she’d have been able to let go of his hand even if she’d wanted to. Which she hadn’t. 

“Tess,” Jordan says, her voice sounding far away — like she’s put down the phone and walked across the apartment. “I am just trying to figure out who I’m going to be spending the next several hours of my life with. I’m just making sure it isn’t some creep.”

“He’s definitely not a creep… he only threatened me with a baseball bat once,” Tessa says, laughing. 

“He’s  _ that _ neighbour?” She can hear that Jordan has picked her phone back up, her voice growing louder. “He’s the baseball bat guy? The one who stole your wifi?” 

“That was a mistake, honestly.” Tessa sighs; she shouldn’t have brought that up. 

“I will be telling that story at your wedding, Sam,” her sister says. “Everyone will get a kick out of it.” 

Tessa bites her lip to stop herself from arguing further with her sister, because the more she insists that there is nothing between her and Scott, the less she believes it’s true. She was hoping that the longer she waited, the calmer the fluttering sensation she feels in her stomach every time she thinks of Scott would get, that her thoughts about him with his hands and lips roaming her body would quiet down. She had thought that it was just a fluke, a seed planted by Jeff, exacerbated by her extended dry spell. But the truth is that the more time she spends with Scott, the more time she wants to spend with him. The more she just  _ wants _ him. 

Tessa shakes her head. This isn’t the time for this, not as she’s headed out the door to meet him. She flips off her hall light and grabs her keys from the key hook by her door, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “Jo, just promise me you’ll behave?” she says as she steps out into the bright light of the apartment hallway. “We’ll be there to get you in twenty, okay?” 

“I’ll be on my best behaviour,” her sister answers, and she can hear the smirk through the phone.

This is going to be fun. It’s too late for coffee — not unless she wants to be up all night — and wine doesn’t seem like an appropriate roadtrip drink. Maybe she can talk Scott into a Tim Horton’s stop and the sugar rush from a pack of Timbits will help her get through two hours in a car with him and Jordan. 

“Bye,” she says, not waiting for a response before hanging up on her sister and heading the few feet from her door to Scott’s. 

She’s just tucking her phone into her pocket when Scott steps out of his door. She wasn’t expecting him to come out into the hall before she knocked so she startles for a second before he smiles and a sense of calm instantly washes over her. He has his own small duffle bag slung over his shoulder, and he’s dressed a little more casually than she’s seen him yet, in worn jeans and an old Team Canada t-shirt. 

“Hey T,” he says, smiling again. It’s that special smile that lights up his eyes and softens his face. It’s a smile that makes her feel special — makes her hope she’s the only one he offers that look too — like just seeing her has changed the whole outlook of his day. “Ready to hit the road?” 

“You’re sure about driving us still?” she asks for probably the seventh time since he offered last night. She’s not sure she made it clear what he’d be getting into suggesting to drive Jordan as well. 

“More than okay, Tess,” he starts, closing the small gap between them. “I’m looking forward to meeting your sister.” 

Her eyes widen at that, and she isn’t exactly sure what that means, or what to say in response. He seems to be floundering too as he clears his throat and runs a hand through his hair. “Uh, you know… because if she’s your favourite person, she must be pretty great.” 

“Yeah,” Tessa says, taking a deep breath. They are standing close now, and he’s looking at her, his eyes darting from her eyes to her lips to some point on the wall behind her, like he’s contemplating leaning in and kissing her. He looked at her like that last night too, once they got back to the apartment and he walked her the few extra feet to her door. They’d stood outside her door in silence and he’d looked at her just like that. It was a look that said he wanted nothing more than to kiss her goodnight, to wrap his arms around her waist and pull her in close before pressing his lips against hers. 

But he didn’t. 

And maybe she’d just been imagining it. But she had to bite her lip and look away, casting her gaze down at the ground, where she scuffed her foot across the floor. Otherwise, she probably would have leaned in herself. If he had kissed her she knows she would have melted right into it. Wouldn’t have been able to stop herself. But she can’t let that happen, can’t kiss him. Not now. 

Today he does lean in, but instead of kissing her, he reaches for the strap of her bag. “I can take this,” he says.

She shakes her head, her hand automatically going to hold the strap of her bag, her fingers brushing against his. “It’s okay, it isn’t very heavy.” 

He shrugs. “I know, but I’d like to… there are certain things your mom teaches you that just stick, I guess.” 

She pauses, taking in the softness of his eyes, breathing in the scent of his soap (piney) and the dampness of his hair (he must have just showered), and reflecting on how genuine his offer seems. “Okay,” she says finally, letting go of the strap and allowing him to pull it off her shoulder and sling it over his own. 

She smiles at him and they head off towards the elevator together, their strides easily falling in sync with one another. In the elevator, Scott presses the button for the building’s underground parking garage. 

“You know,” Tessa starts, to drown out the noise of the elevator running — elevators always make her nervous. “I’ve never actually been in the garage here.”

“Really?” Scott says, his eyebrows rising in surprise. 

“I don’t really drive.” She shrugs and she can feel her cheeks pinking and she looks up at the floor display above the elevator doors. 

“You do have a license though, right?” Scott asks, a hint of teasing in his tone. 

“Yeah. I didn’t get it until I was a bit older though. After I officially retired from ballet.” It had been during the few months she was recovering from her second surgery. “I was here in Toronto and too focused on ballet to bother with driving when I was a teen… and now, I don’t know… I really just don’t like it. Probably because I never drive.” 

Scott is nodding along beside her. “That makes perfect sense,” he says. “I only have my car here because I go back home so often, and when I play a game of hockey here and there I don’t want to subject anyone on transit to the smell of my gear.” 

That makes her laugh. “Take it from a very frequent Toronto public transit user; your consideration is very much appreciated.” 

The elevator doors open and together they step into the garage. It’s brighter than Tessa expected, with rows of fluorescent lights flickering above them, hanging from the ceiling along with the exposed piping. Scott guides her to his parking stall where his black Acura SUV is parked. 

“Fancy,” she muses, while he opens the trunk to put their bags. 

He chuckles while opening the zipper of his bag. “Thanks.” He pauses, pulling a familiar red bag out of his own bag. “Before I forget, I got these for you. I needed new toothpaste and they were on sale at Shoppers.” He rushes out the last bit like he’s worried about her reaction. 

“You got me Lindors?” she asks, her voice nearly getting lost in the space around them. 

“I remember you saying they were your favourites,” is his answer, as he hands her the bag of chocolates. 

* * *

He can feel himself inadvertently holding his breath as he hands her the Lindor bag, worried that he’s overstepped somehow. But then he remembers he’s literally driving her and her sister back to London, and Tessa smiles and thanks him for the chocolate and it’s like a huge weight has been lifted off his shoulders.

They chat idly as they make their way into his car, about their plans for the weekend and the weather, and Scott has a split second where he wishes it were just him and Tessa making the drive to London tonight, without her sister.

He banishes that thought as soon as it comes though; he was the one to offer his driving services, after all, and from what Tessa has told him about Jordan, he’s excited to meet her too. 

(Truth be told, there’s also a little voice in the back of his head that hopes Jordan approves of him. She’s Tessa’s big sister after all, and he wants to make a good impression. Especially because it might actually get him a step closer to acknowledging whatever it is that’s going on between him and her little sister right now.)

It’s a short drive to Jordan’s apartment, and they spend it discussing the options for the driving playlist — a crucial component to any roadtrip, according to the both of them — and eventually they connect his phone to the speaker and let Tessa queue up a playlist that’s general enough to suit all of their likes.

If it were up to him, the entire thing would be country, with some Eminem and the Hip thrown in for good measure, but he learns that Tessa loves oldies (her favourite is Hall & Oates and he thinks she’d get along great with his grandma, though he wisely doesn’t mention that) and Taylor Swift, and somehow, it endears her to him even more.

Jordan is already standing outside on the curb when they pull up, her suitcase and tote neatly stacked next to her. She looks so much like Tessa that he might have thought they were twins if he didn’t know better, and she waves enthusiastically when she spots his car.

One parallel parking job later (he’s quite proud of himself for squeezing into such a tight spot), they get out of the car to say hello and load in her things. Jordan greets Tessa with a hug and then immediately wraps Scott in one too, which surprises him for a second until he responds and gives her a quick squeeze.

“You must be Scott,” Jordan says, and he can see Tessa shooting her sister a look already. “I’ve heard so much about you from Sam, it’s so nice to finally meet you.” Tessa is glaring daggers at this point and Scott is trying to stifle a laugh, while simultaneously filing away the nickname Jordan used and resolving himself to ask Tessa about it later.

“It’s nice to meet you too,” he says and moves to grab Jordan’s suitcase. “Let me take this for you.”

As he loads it into the trunk he can hear her say: “He’s such a gentleman,” to Tessa and he feels himself blush. Somehow he’s got a feeling that this road trip will be an interesting couple of hours. He closes the lid of his trunk and turns to the Virtues for one last check that everyone’s got everything they need. Both of them nod, and then Jordan calls shotgun and sprints over to the passenger seat like she’s a little kid.

Tessa cries out indignantly and Scott just laughs. Yeah, this will be a fun one.

They set out on the busy downtown streets, Scott in the driver’s seat, Jordan next to him and Tessa leaning over toward the middle console so she can control the music from his phone. She’s been put on DJ duty since she knows what both she and Jordan like listening to, and Scott can’t really play music and drive at the same time.

He still doesn’t quite know what to expect from Jordan, so he opens the conversation generally, asking her about her work. It turns out she’s a corporate defence attorney, and teaches barre on the side. She’s been in the city ever since she got her degree, and she and Tessa spend a lot of time hanging out. 

“Sam tells me you’re a sports psych?” she asks, turning to Scott. “And that’s how you ended up on her podcast?”

Scott nods. “Yeah, I used to be an ice dancer and when I stopped that, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with my life. Once I got my shit together and started university, psychology wasn’t even on my radar until I had a sports psych lecture the second term of first-year.” He tells Jordan the shortened version of how he got to where he is today, and he feels some sort of weight lift off his chest as he sees her nodding approvingly.

“So now you’re Scott Moir, sports performance specialist and baseball bat-wielder,” Jordan replies with a smirk and he can hear Tessa groaning from the back seat. Scott just laughs.

“Only when I mistakenly suspect there’s a haunting going on, don’t worry,” he says, having expected this to come up sooner or later. “I don’t make it a habit of surprising my neighbours with a blunt force instrument. Just to set that record straight.”

“Good to know,” Jordan deadpans, and he chuckles.

Tessa takes the opening to pipe up from her perch in the back and point out a Tim Horton’s one block over. “We could stop and get some hot chocolates for the road,” she suggests, and Scott starts to manoeuvre them toward the drive-through. 

He learns that the Virtue sisters are very particular when it comes to their Timbits, and Jordan and Tessa spend a good two minutes arguing the merits of all the flavours they’re planning on filling their box of twenty with. Hot chocolate and Timbits in tow, Scott merges onto the road again, and the sweet stuff proves enough of a distraction for the next ten minutes that there’s not much discussion going on.

Then, out of the blue, Jordan shifts in her seat so she’s looking at him. “So, Scott, have you dated anyone recently?” He’s a bit startled at the question but he’s decided for himself that he’s going to try his hardest to pass whatever test Jordan is evidently putting him through, so he answers with a smile.

“Not recently. I had a serious girlfriend in grad school, but it ended when she moved out to Alberta to be a physio. I’ve seen some girls casually since then, but I’ve been pretty much single for all of this year.” He decides it’s probably best not to mention his proclivity for casual hookups in undergrad and the year after Caroline moved to Edmonton, lest he leave Jordan with the impression that he’s some sort of weirdo playboy.

“Tess has been single for a while now too,” Jordan says with a knowing undertone and she shoots a meaningful look at her sister. Said sister groans from the backseat, and Scott suppresses a smile at that particular piece of information. He hopes it’ll come in handy eventually. “Wasn’t your last boyfriend Nick from dance school?”

“Jo, can we please  _ not _ go there right now? Or do you want me to ask you about Hannah from barre, because I absolutely will do that if you don’t drop it.”

He catches Jordan’s blush out of the corner of his eye and fights a tiny smirk on Tessa’s behalf. She’s obviously been through the sisterly love life interrogation, and has enough of her own ammunition to make this a fair fight. 

“Fine,” Jordan says, voice clearly pained over having to give up this particular avenue of questioning, but she perks up soon enough. “So you two went to the game together this week?”

Now it’s his and Tessa’s turn to blush (which he spies out of his rear-view mirror and flushes even redder at) and they recount their evening at the Leafs game, from the insane seats to Scott’s freakout about meeting Babsy for the first time. Neither of them mentions the walk back, or when they started holding hands, but he can tell they’re both thinking about it anyway.

They didn’t address it earlier, when he picked her up at her apartment. Truth be told, he doesn’t even know how to bring it up with Tessa, because it just kind of happened and then, when they arrived at their building and he’d pulled out his keys they’d let go… and just never mentioned it again. They’d said goodbye in the hallway, and neither of them had known quite what to do beyond that. Finally, Scott had pulled her into some sort of awkward side hug, and she’d squeezed his bicep and then pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and blushed and they’d headed their separate ways.

And the thing is… he doesn’t want to rush her. He can sense that she’s feeling _something,_ what with how she blushes around him and seems to want to spend time with him. But there’s something else there, some lingering feeling that’s holding her back. And he’s afraid that if he pushes her, doesn’t let her take this at her own pace, that she’ll pull back from him entirely.

So Scott Moir, former king of the one-night-stand, is playing the long game. He’s resolved to letting her initiate whatever she’s comfortable with and just let this develop naturally. Even after just knowing her for a few short weeks, he already knows this is too special to fuck up.  _ She’s  _ too special for him to fuck this up. Ever since he met her, nearly whacked her with a baseball bat, he’s been enchanted and he’s convinced that feeling won’t go away anytime soon.

But Jordan doesn’t need to know any of that, so their talk of last night is mostly limited to the game itself, and the fact that even though it had been a perfect night, the Leafs had been sadly defeated. 

“It was still a great night though,” Scott says, not noticing the smile that has started to spread across his lips. “Really great.”

Jordan coughs from the passenger seat and stifles a smirk. “Uh huh.” 

_ Damn it. _

He needs a topic change, and stat. Thankfully, Tessa saves his ass from the backseat. “We tried that vegan café close to the office a few days back, Jo, the one you had talked about.”

Jordan, blessedly, bites. “Yeah? Was it any good?”

Scott can’t hold back a laugh at the memory; his food that had been a mystery to him and Tessa’s offer to share pancakes are at the forefront of his mind. Tessa laughs too, unable to resist a friendly dig. “Yeah, once you understand what’s actually on the menu.”

“What?” Jordan’s confused and he doesn’t blame her.

“I ordered something called the...  _ Purple Haze, _ I think?”

Tessa giggles. “Yeah, except you had no idea what the hell you’d ordered and we spent the next ten minutes trying to figure out what it was.”

“It was a quinoa bowl… thingy,” he clarifies. Jordan nods. She doesn’t seem to get how a food mix-up could be this funny, but laughs along politely nonetheless. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her raise an eyebrow at Tessa, who blushes.

“Our offices are really close,” she says, in their defence. “We got a post-podcast lunch.”

Another “uh huh” escapes Jordan’s lips and she smirks again.

“Barre. Hannah,” Tessa hisses, and that shuts her sister up quickly.

“You’re heading to Ilderton after dropping us off?” Jordan asks, and Scott smiles, like he always does when someone brings up his family.

“Yeah, I’m staying at my parents’ house for the weekend and my brothers are coming down with their kids.”

She gives an approving nod. “So you like kids then?”

“Jo!”

Scott laughs. “Yeah, my nieces and nephews are great. I don’t get to see them as often as I’d like, so I always look forward to weekends like this.”

“We’re just going home to our mom’s,” Jordan says, “for some girl time. Hopefully with lots of wine.” Tessa snorts from the backseat and Scott stifles a chuckle.

“I think she may have actually gone out with that guy she met golfing at the country club,” Tessa says in a conspiratorial whisper, “so we’ll need it.”

“Well good luck to you two.” Scott grins when he sees the exit sign for London coming up ahead. “Need to make a pit stop at the liquor store beforehand?”

* * *

When Scott pulls into the driveway at their mom’s house, it’s nearly ten. The trip wasn’t entirely a disaster like she thought it might be, and even as embarrassed as she was by Jordan’s question, she is glad to know that Scott also hasn’t had a serious relationship in a while. Now though, Tessa is exhausted. 

“Well ladies,” Scott says, turning off the engine. “This is the end of the road.” 

“Thanks so much for driving us,” Jordan says from the front as she undoes her seatbelt.

“It was really no problem at all,” Scott says with a bright smile. She has no idea how he can be so chipper right now, after driving for nearly two and a half hours. “I’ll go grab your bags from the trunk.” 

Tessa takes her time getting collected in the backseat while both Scott and Jordan get out of the car and walk around to the trunk. She just needs a minute to breathe, to collect her thoughts and feelings. So, she double-checks for any leftover Tim’s garbage (she isn’t going to leave trash in Scott’s car, even if he said he’d get it later) and carefully closes up the half empty Lindor bag to stuff in her purse. 

By the time she gets out, empty Timbit box and hot chocolate cups in hand, Jordan has already got both their overnight bags slung over her shoulders. 

“Have a good weekend with your family,” Jordan says, going in for a side hug. 

“I will,” Scott says, giving Jordan a quick squeeze. “It was really nice to meet you.”

“You too,” she says to Scott. Tessa doesn’t miss the sincerity to her voice, the genuine smile she sports. “We’ll see you Sunday late afternoon? To head back to the city?” Scott nods. Then Jordan turns to Tessa and says, “I’m going to get these bags inside and check if mom is back yet, I’ll let you say goodbye.” 

Before Tessa can reply, Jordan is sauntering up the walkway to the front door. Scott closes the trunk and shoves his hands in his pockets, rocking onto the balls of his feet like he’s not sure what to do now, how they should part. She’s not really sure how to proceed either, not with Jordan in the house, likely watching their every move from the window. 

She wants to be close to him, wants to sweep the stray piece of hair off his forehead, wants to wrap her arms around him and hold him close to convey her gratitude, wants to nuzzle in close and whisper  _ thank you. _ Not only for the ride, but for being such a good sport and dealing with Jordan’s grilling — something he probably wasn’t expecting at all. 

Instead, she looks down and busies herself with bending the paper Tim Horton’s cups and putting them in the Timbit box to free up one of her hands. When she looks back up at him, he’s smiling at her, head tilted a bit to the side, like maybe he’s trying to figure out what she’s thinking. 

“Thank you, again,” she starts, scuffing her shoe against the driveway. “Um, and for Sunday… if you don’t want to put up with us again, it’s really okay. You don’t have to drive us home as well.” 

He takes a step closer, shaking his head. “Tessa, I want to,” he pauses. “I’m looking forward to seeing you again Sunday. Besides we really are going back to the same place, it would be silly for you guys to take the train.” 

“Thank you. And I’m sorry about Jordan, I know she can be a bit hard to take in sometimes.” 

Scott laughs and shakes his head again. “It’s all good, Tess. I like her, she’s funny. I’m glad I got to meet her.” 

“Again, thank you.” Tessa really needs to stop saying that, but she is not sure what else to say without her feelings spilling out. “Well, I guess we’ll see you Sunday? Around four?” 

Scott is nodding. “Yeah, that sounds good to me. I look forward to spending more time with you two… especially you.” She doesn’t miss his sharp intake of breath, like he hadn’t meant to say that last bit, but it’s what he meant. He’s looking at her like she might run away. 

She needs him to know she wants to spend more time with just him too. So, she doesn’t resist her urge to hug him, to put her arms around him. 

“Bye Scott,” she says, as she wraps him in a tight embrace. It’s awkward with the old Timbit box she’s still holding, but they make due. 

He only hesitates for a second before engulfing her completely in his arms and holding her against him. She feels him tuck his head into the crook of her neck, gently sweeping her hair out of the way before whispering a soft, “Goodnight, Tessa. I can’t wait to see you on Sunday.” 

“I’ll be armed with a road trip playlist this time, so get ready. You won’t know what hit you.” She smiles when he chuckles against her shoulder. He holds her for a few moments and she sinks into him. When they pull apart she can feel the cold autumn air, a chill she hadn’t been aware of before. 

“And,” she adds, to break the silence that’s fallen between them, “maybe we can try out that burger place sometime soon?”

His face lights up in a lopsided grin and she can’t help but return the smile. 

“I’d love to.”

She scuffs her foot on the pavement. “Well, I’ll see you in a few days then.”

Scott nods. “Yeah. Bye,” he says as he turns to get back into his car, looking more than a little reluctant to leave her. She thinks she can see her own feelings reflected in his expression. She doesn’t want to walk away either, wants to sink back into his embrace and stay there awhile. 

Back inside, Jordan is, of course, standing by the big front window, wearing a smirk. 

“That was quite the neighbourly hug,” she says, laughing. 

Tessa walks right past her to get to the kitchen garbage. Jordan follows her, not losing the smile. 

“He was just saying goodbye,” Tessa says. 

Jordan laughs again. “Yup, just a friendly goodbye, that’s why your cheeks look like a tomato and you’re a little dazed.” 

Tessa busies herself trying to fill the kettle, to have tea ready for when their mom gets home. Jordan shadows her, shaking her head and chuckling under her breath. Tessa can feel the heat of her blush rising again under her sister’s scrutiny. 

“You are  _ so _ into him!” Jordan says finally. “And you’re so bad at hiding it.”

Tessa turns slowly to face her sister. “Let’s just say, theoretically, I did have feelings for him… it doesn’t matter. I don’t know if he feels the same way and besides he was a guest on my podcast, isn’t that like some kind of line I can’t cross? I met him for my job, he’s… I can’t…” 

Jordan wraps her in a hug, squeezing her tight. “You’re so ridiculous, Sam. First of all, that boy is head over heels for you. It’s obvious by how he looks at you.”

Tessa scoffs. “Really?”

Her sister shakes her head and lets out a disbelieving chuckle. “Just  _ look _ at him, Tessie. He lights up when he sees you. And you can’t stop blushing whenever you so much as glance at him.”

“Do not!” She feels a need to defend herself, even around Jordan. It’s strange; they’ve never kept secrets before but somehow, the subject of Scott puts her on the defensive.

“All I’m saying is don’t give up on this before you’ve given it a chance,” Jordan says, and Tessa can’t really argue with that. 

Still — “But he was on the podcast! It’s a conflict of interest, I’m sure!”

Jordan heaves a sigh, the kind that only older siblings can manage to fill with equal parts love and exasperation. “For someone as smart as you, you shut your brain off sometimes,” she says, fondness in her tone. “If you’re so worried, wait until the podcast is out. It’s not going to be a problem either way, but if it makes you feel better, wait until he’s not a source anymore.”

Tessa looks at her sister, sees the encouragement in her eyes, and then thinks of Scott. Of all the things she’s been suppressing these past few weeks, of all the ways she wants to know him, of all the ways she  _ wants _ him. She takes a deep breath and squeezes her eyes shut, steeling herself. When she opens them again, she’s made the decision.

“Okay. Fine. I’ll see what happens — but only when the podcast is out!”

Jordan laughs and gives her another squeeze. “See, that wasn’t  _ that _ hard!”

Tessa fixes her sister with a scowl and jabs her in the ribs.


	8. the (almost) kiss

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *taps mic* Is this thing still on? We realize it's been an absolute age and we're sorry, but life and work and uni hit us hard these last few months. We hope this chapter makes up for the wait just a little bit, and that you enjoy. Again, all our thanks to only_because3 for reading this over.

Just as Tessa is settling in with her overly full glass of red wine and the Leafs game in the background — she’s been editing the podcast all day and needs to unwind — she hears a loud cheer from the other side of the adjoining wall with Scott’s apartment. She looks up, and sure enough, the Leafs have scored the first goal of the game. She smiles to herself as she hears Scott say a slightly quieter though still audible  _ Way to go boys!  _

They’ve been texting back and forth pretty regularly since last weekend but because she’s been self-sequestered to her recording studio all day today she hasn’t spoken to him at all. She thought the faster she got the podcast edited and ready to go for Monday, the sooner she could find out where things may go between them. Though she’s caught herself distracted by merely the recording of his voice on more than one occasion. And now, hearing his voice in real-time through the wall is just as distracting but also somewhat comforting, knowing he’s right there. Since they haven’t spoken today, and that’s a shame, she decides to send him a text. 

**_Go leafs! Eh?_ ** She types out, her finger hovering only for a moment over the send button before sending.

He responds less than a minute later, before she’s even had a chance to settle back into her couch and sip her wine. His response is expectedly enthusiastic.  **_Are you watching!?_ **

She snaps a quick picture of her wine in hand, game on in the background.  **_Yup! Just me, my wine and the boys in blue!_ ** She fails to capture her old ratty leggings and loose tank top, what she’s been cozily curled up in all day while she works. Or the Babsocks he bought her at the game last week. 

**_No big saturday night plans?_ ** he jokes, adding a winky face emoji because she knows he knows full well that her weekend plans are something along the lines of editing her podcast and her social life outside Jordan and Jeff is minimal. 

**_Maybe I like spending my Saturdays alone with wine_ ** she shoots back, with the tongue sticking out emoji, knowing he’d only used one for her benefit, as he’s noted how often she likes to use them. 

It’s a few minutes after that and she hasn’t heard back from him. She assumed he went back to watching the game, so she attempts to focus her attention and do the same. She looks at her TV, sees the players moving about the screen, is vaguely aware of the position of the puck, but can’t seem to concentrate on anything that’s happening. Her mind is drifting to the other side of the wall, imagining what the inside of Scott’s apartment might look like, how his couch is arranged corresponding to his TV. Does he lounge back into the cushions, getting comfortable, settling in for the whole game, or does he sit on the edge of his seat, knees bouncing, worrying the label of his beer as he anticipates each play? She’s picturing something closer to the latter, his hand running through his hair, disheveling it in the best way when another text comes in:  **_You and ur wine are welcome to join me for the game, if you want? could use the company it’s gonna be a nail-biter._ **

She hesitates for a moment because this is not at all part of her plan. She wants to wait for the podcast to be out and then ask him for a proper date — a nice dinner maybe. Or even to coffee, the same spot they went that first time where she could reach across the table and take his hand in hers, make it still from where he’d be shredding the paper sleeve and say  _ I’ve really liked getting to know you the past couple weeks and even though the podcast is out now, I would really like to continue getting to know you, like this.  _ But she’s missed him this week. They’ve both been busy with work so her only communication with him since he drove her and Jordan home last Sunday has been through text. She’s itching to see him, her skin is crawling with the desire to be close to him. She can almost feel his warmth through the wall of their apartments just thinking about it. 

**_Okay_ ** , is what she ends up responding. Then she gets up, quickly ducks into the bathroom to look in the mirror, running her thumbs under her eyes to wipe away any mascara smudges before taking herself and her wine out into the hall with a determined stride. She doesn’t even think to put her shoes on — if she’d stopped to do that she might have changed her mind — just pads down the hall in her socked feet. 

She doesn’t stop to think until she’s at his door already knocking, full glass of wine in one hand, the other held at eye level about to knock again. She looks at her wine and thinks of the bottle sitting on her counter and realizes how she should have brought it too so they could share. He invited her to his home, the least she could have done was bring him a glass of wine too. She’s about to turn back around when the door swings open and he’s there, grinning at her, a combination of both giddiness and maybe disbelief washing over his features. Like maybe he didn’t believe she’d actually take him up on his offer. Like she’d be able to say no. God, she’s so fucked.

He looks so pleased to see her that he just stands there looking at her for a moment, and Tessa finds herself looking right back at him. Scott looks good, in his low slung sweats and faded Tragically Hip t-shirt. His hair is a mess and she thinks she was right when she imagined him running his hands through it while he watched a particularly tense play. She wants to run her own fingers through it, wants to comb it back into place.

“Hi T,” he says finally, flashing her with a bright grin, and is she dreaming or does his entire face light up when he’s looking at her? She feels her breath catch and warmth pool low in her belly and she can’t be making this up, right? It’s how he’s looking at her, like there is no one in the world he’d rather see. She doesn’t know what to do with it.

“I forgot to bring you a glass of wine,” she says, instead of a greeting, holding out her own glass to show him. “I’ll go get one… and I didn’t wear shoes,” she notes though she isn’t really sure why those words come out of her mouth, or what exactly is wrong with her right now that she can’t manage human interaction. 

He looks from her wine to her feet and smiles, shaking his head and she doesn’t miss the fondness in his eyes when he looks back up to her face. “It’s all good T,” he says, gently taking her free hand and guiding her into his front entryway. It’s the exact same layout as hers, except instead of a mirror and small table he has coat hooks and a bench, the baseball bat from their first encounter leaning against it. “I already have a beer on the go, and really you’re just saving yourself the step of having to take the shoes back off.”

She follows him inside, treading the same familiar path from the front door to the living room. Except it’s different. Where her apartment is bright, white and creams and clean lines — with pops of colour in the form of artwork and fresh flowers — Scott’s is simple but cozy with lots of dark woods and deep blues. He sits himself down on the large grey sectional and nods for her to do the same. 

The game is on with the volume relatively low, just enough to hear the commentators. He’s got an open beer sweating on the glass coffee table with a bag of Tostitos and some salsa next to it. As he grabs for his beer she sets her wine on the table and settles in next to him, not too close, making sure there’s enough distance between them to be friendly but not cold, but not close enough that they’re at risk of touching. 

“Thanks for coming,” he says, taking a sip of his beer. “It’s always better to watch the game with company.” 

She nods. “Yeah, I think so too.” 

His eyebrows raise slightly at that, like the answer surprises him just a bit. “Yeah? I’m not gonna lie, I figured you’d turn me down, preferring quiet time after working all day.” 

She shakes her head, even if she weren’t in need of human contact she still wouldn’t have turned him down. She doesn’t want him thinking that. “No, I wouldn’t,” she takes a breath. “Besides, I don’t think I’ve seen another living breathing human for two days, I’ve had too much quiet.” Just quiet and the sound of his voice on a loop. 

He laughs. “I’d lose my mind.” 

She shrugs. “I don’t mind, but sometimes I need to get out and say hi to a real person.”

“Well, glad I can help,” he says with another bright smile, shifting ever so slightly closer to her on the couch. 

Eventually, the game picks up, and they fall into an easy quiet, their focus turned to the game. With the game playing low in the background, Tessa can’t help but focus on the sound of Scott breathing next to her, or the occasional rustle of the chip bag as he grabs another handful. Her hand brushes his when she goes to grab a few of her own. 

When the Leafs score a second time he practically jumps off the couch, his whole body reacting with his  _ whoop _ and fist pump. When he settles back down, it’s closer to her, so their thighs are brushing and he puts his arm around her shoulders across the back of the couch. She has to take a deep calming breath to steady herself, settling more into him as she does so. Feeling his warmth against her is almost too much and her resolve is so close to breaking. 

_ Just until the end of the weekend, _ she thinks to herself, even as she settles herself closer into him, leaning ever so slightly into his side. Just until after Monday afternoon when she posts the finished podcast then they can go on a proper date and she can kiss him. God, she wants to kiss him right now. She closes her eyes for a second. After a few more breaths and a moment to refocus on the game she thinks she can handle this, until his finger begins to trace the freckles on her shoulder.

She shivers and her breath catches in her throat and he’s leaning in closer, looking at her, only her. His expression is soft, his eyes full of wonder and he looks at her, studying her face like it holds the answers to every question he’s ever had. Then his gaze falls to her lips and her heart leaps in her throat, beating erratically, a sharp staccato in her chest. She swallows hard and blinks, squeezing her eyes shut. 

She wants so badly for him to close the distance between them, to press his lips to hers. To lay her back against the arm of the couch and fit his body against her frame while his lips explore hers, drawing out the most delicious little moans. But she can’t. Not tonight. She has plans. She needs those two days more, just until the podcast is out. Then she’ll be free of these feelings of anxiety that washes over her and tells her that this isn’t  _ allowed, _ that she’s going to ruin something. She’s not sure what could happen but she can’t let this be broken by not waiting two days. 

And she knows, she knows if he kisses her, if he presses her into the couch, his body over hers, that she’s going to want  _ everything. _ And she’s not ready for that. She’s not ready. Because what if that’s it? What if the have sex and that’s it? She needs to be sure, sure she can handle where she thinks this is headed. Sure that he wants the same thing. She’ll wait for the podcast to come out, then things will make sense. She’s convinced herself of it.

She knows it’s absolutely irrational, that it’s not like she’s reporting on politics or business or some other actually-potentially-life-threatening beat where source relationships matter this much but still, she’s principled. She didn’t go to journalism school to throw all she learnt in ethics classes out the window.

It’s not like she isn’t fully aware that she’s taking this a bit too far, but the niggling voice inside her head won’t quit and it’s currently spinning all sorts of sordid tales of discredited journalistic reputations and failed relationships and libel suits and somehow ends with her penniless and destitute and without the job at the CBC. 

She’s spun herself so far into this that she’s about to start hyperventilating from worry, and beyond not kissing him, Scott really doesn’t need  _ that _ from her today. She needs an escape, and fast.

“I have to use the bathroom!” she blurts, jumping off the couch with such ferocity that Scott is pushed backwards. He’s left trying to balance himself, looking at her in a mild state of shock while she bolts towards the hall washroom. 

* * *

Scott thought the night was going well. Really well, if he’s being bold here. 

Tessa coming over was unexpected, but he’s so glad she did. He’s missed her over the past week, since he dropped her and Jordan back off in Toronto and they went their separate ways again. His work has been stressful, and hers has been too, and they’ve barely had time to breathe. 

He’s only known Tessa less than two weeks and already it feels like not seeing her is akin to having a piece of himself missing, like something’s not the way it should be. Scott could spend hours psychoanalyzing what it means for him to have formed such an attachment to her over such a short period of time, really get into the science of it, but he finds he doesn’t want to know the  _ whys  _ of it all.

He just wants to relish in the fact that he gets to see her, that they get to watch hockey on his beat-up couch and take some more baby steps in this quasi-not-quite-relationship of theirs.

Maybe it’s the beer talking, or the heady feeling of having her so close, but Scott feels brave tonight. The Leafs score and suddenly it’s the most natural thing in the world to put his arm on the back of the sofa, conveniently around her shoulders. He knows he’s taking this whole thing slow, letting her set the pace, but they’ve been moving glacially to begin with so a little nudge won’t hurt, right?

Tessa settles into his side and shifts closer, and he takes it as a good sign, a great one even. Maybe today’s the day. Maybe he can get the glacier to melt. (And then never use a metaphor again in his life, god.)

He turns so he can see her, really look at her. The game is forgotten in the background and Scott’s focus is all on Tessa. The way her cheeks have flushed, the wisps of hair that have come loose from her ponytail, the freckles that dot her nose and cheeks. 

She doesn’t realize he’s looking at her at first, and he wonders briefly if he should refocus on the TV so as not to come across as some creeper. But he can’t seem to tear his eyes away from her, and suddenly, he finds himself leaning just that little bit closer.

Tessa turns her head then, eyes wide, her gaze flitting from his eyes to his lips and back again. Scott leans in further.  _ The glacier has officially melted, _ he thinks to himself, in three, two — 

And then Tessa blurts out that she has to use the washroom and practically leaps up from his couch. Well then.

Scott is left sitting there, absolutely dumbfounded, while the woman of his dreams (yep, he’s hit that level of sappy and desperate) runs for the hills. Shit, shit, shit. It was going  _ so _ well, too. He groans and lets his head fall to the back of the couch before scrubbing a hand over his face. What just  _ happened? _

He was so sure that she was going to lean in too, let her eyes flutter shut. It was going to be perfect. And then she pulled away and ran.

As the former king of the one-night-stand, he realizes he’s not the most experienced when it comes to successfully starting an actual relationship. Caroline had been a university hookup that morphed into a relationship, so he doesn’t even have that to fall back on. Is it always like this, he muses, that women send mixed signals on purpose and leave the men to decipher their code?

Because if so, he’d be getting a big, fat F in Tessa-101.

Tessa, who’s still in his washroom, probably coming up with the nicest possible way of telling him she’s just not interested, that he’s been misinterpreting just about everything from the start. Tessa, who will come back and inevitably say her goodbyes and run for the hills, leaving him alone on the couch to try to dissect the past week and a half and figure out just where he went wrong.

Scott sighs, a deep dramatic thing, and deflates further into the cushions of his sofa. He really wouldn’t mind becoming one with the upholstery right about now. 

It feels like five hours have passed when he finally hears the bathroom door open (it squeaks a little, and he should really oil that hinge at some point) and Scott mentally braces himself for the impending rejection. He can deal with this; he’s a well-adjusted, professional adult. It’s no big deal. Sure, being friend-zoned always hurts, but this too shall pass.

Tessa pads back into his living room in her Babsocks and Scott feels himself inadvertently holding in a breath, expecting the worst. But then, to his utter shock and surprise, Tessa sits herself back down on his couch as if nothing happened. (She’s maintaining some distance, sure, but she’s  _ there. _ )

“Did I miss anything?” she asks, looking over at him with those damn doe eyes. Scott doesn’t register her words for a second there, because they’re not a variation of “I’m sorry, I have to go,” so it takes him a bit to respond. 

“No, no,” he lies (he hasn’t been watching the TV at all, has quite frankly no idea what’s happening in this game right now and doesn’t even care), flashing her his best casual, friendly smile. “Nothing important.”

Tessa nods, apparently appeased by his answer, and curls her legs under herself, settling back on the sofa. Scott exhales, his whole body deflating from the stress of the past few minutes, and he sneaks a quick glance in her direction.

She seems to be caught up in the game again, and Scott feels himself relax fractionally at the sight. He might’ve fucked up the whole “trying to kiss her” thing, but at least she didn’t bolt, and he tallies that in the  _ win  _ column for the night.

The last period of the game is only marginally exciting, but the Leafs just barely eke out a win, so it’s a good one, all things considered. He and Tessa spend the last few minutes practically bouncing up and down on the couch, trying to manifest the win through sheer force of will, and when the Leafs do emerge victorious, he lets out a whoop of relief.

“Well,” Tessa says when the broadcast is over and the channel switches to post-game analysis, “thank you so much for having me over.”

“Of course,” Scott says, scrambling to get up so he can see her out. “It’s always more fun to watch with company.”

Tessa smiles, and Scott has to grin right back and somehow, all the awkwardness from earlier has managed to right itself. Tessa picks up her now-empty wine glass and starts heading toward the door, Scott on her heels.

He beats her there, so he can hold it open for her like the gentleman his mother taught him to be, and she blushes slightly as she ducks through the entryway.

“I’ll see you around,” she says, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear.

“Yeah,” he replies, for lack of a better thing to say. He’s not sure whether to hug her, after his last attempt in physical contact ended with her running for the hills (or rather, his bathroom), so he just stands there, awkwardly, with his hands in his jean pockets.

Tessa shifts her weight between her feet and bites her lip, as if she’s mentally debating something. He’s about to ask her what’s going on, when she pushes herself up on her tiptoes and presses a kiss to his cheek, quick as a wink.

She blushes scarlet when she settles back down and Scott thinks he must look like a tomato himself right about now. Well,  _ that _ was unexpected. Not unwelcome, at all, but unexpected for sure.

He doesn’t even have time to process what just happened, because Tessa stammers out a quick goodbye and then disappears behind her door, leaving Scott standing out in the hallway, wondering what the hell this even  _ means. _

* * *

Tessa feels terrible about Saturday — for jumping off Scott’s couch and practically sprinting to the bathroom to compose herself. Scott had seemed so out of sorts when she came back, completely confused as to her behaviour and she can’t blame him. She did want him to kiss her, god she wanted it to badly, but it wasn’t the right time. She wasn’t ready for anything to happen and he was still the subject of one of her yet-to-be-published interviews. 

But today, it’s up. Today she can kiss him, if that’s still what he wants. She hopes that her little kiss on the cheek goodnight let him know that she is, in fact, still interested, that it was all just too much in the moment.

She’s just sent the podcast off to the editing chain and uploaded the promotional video to her social media and to the podcast’s main site. She’s done. His interview will be up later today and she no longer has to feel guilty about pursuing her feelings for him. 

**_Hey Scott! I just wanted to let you know the podcast is up today. Here’s the link to the promotional video. I think it turned out well._ **

It did turn out well, if you’re looking at it from the perspective of her bosses. She, on the other hand, can’t stop blushing trying to get through it. She had to turn it off ten seconds in when Jeff first sent her his edited version. Tessa doesn’t look away from Scott once the entire video. She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen that look of soft affection on her face before,  _ heart eyes  _ as Jeff had called it. And if she trusts herself to see what’s really happening, she thinks Scott looks at her the same way more than once. 

Honestly, she thinks the video looks like it’s meant to be a trailer for a Christmas rom-com, not a professional arts and sports podcast. 

She’s pacing between her kitchen and living room with her phone in her hand, debating if she should text him something else, or maybe just march over to his apartment to explain her behaviour Saturday night. She hadn’t spoken to him at all yesterday, too embarrassed and also too busy editing to find the time to come up with the right words. She nearly drops her phone on the tile when it vibrates in her hand. 

**_Hey Tess, the video looks… great! Thanks for letting me know it’s up today._ **

It’s not the same kind of friendly enthusiasm she’s used to from his texts, it seems more professional, but maybe that’s just in her head. Or maybe he’s embarrassed by how the video was cut. She’d insisted Jeff show her the whole thing and it’s all a lot of the same pining looks. It’s ridiculous honestly, considering they’d only met twice before then. 

Tessa sighs and types out a message to him. She knows if she doesn’t just do it she’ll lose her confidence and she really, really wants this to work out. She talks herself in and out of sending it about five times before actually pressing the button. 

**_Are you free for dinner tonight? I know it’s last minute, but I would really love to see you._ **

Then she practically throws her phone on the couch and rushes to the washroom, getting in the shower to try to relax herself and not agonize over what he may or may not respond. Tessa takes her time in the shower, and then takes her time applying her moisturizer and a swipe of mascara on each eye (in case he does agree to dinner) before heading back out to the living room to check on her phone. There are two messages from Scott. 

**_I’m so sorry, I can’t do dinner tonight. Maybe another time?_ ** Her heart sinks in her chest and it feels like all the air in her lungs has been sucked out. She knows he’s blowing her off, and he has every right to. Especially after she’d bolted on him on Saturday and then text him at all yesterday, though he didn’t text her either. But it still stings. 

The next message had come in ten minutes after the first.  **_I’m in Alberta for a conference... Edmonton actually (maybe i should catch an oilers game and cheer against them for beating the leafs when we watched them). ill be back wendesday though!_ **

Oh. Maybe it isn’t a total blow off and the second message sounds much more like the Scott she’s gotten used to texting — she never can tell though, really wishes he’d use more emojis. She holds her phone to her chest and breathes in deeply for a few moments before settling on her couch. Maybe all isn’t lost.  _ You can do this Tess,  _ she thinks to herself.

**_Totally go and boo them_ **

**_On second thought don’t do that. I wouldn’t want you to get beat up before you get back, even in honour of the Leafs._ **

**_Though, if were to get hurt I’m right next door when you get back, I wouldn’t mind nursing you back to health._ **

Oh shit. What did she just do? First, she never texts three times in a row like that, second what is wrong with her? Was she trying to flirt via text? She doesn’t even know how to flirt in person, let alone by a means of communication so easily misconstrued. Scott — and the worry that she may have ruined her shot with him — has really done something to her head. She feels like she blacked out for a second there, texting without thought.  _ Fuck. _ She sinks into her couch, hoping the cushions will consume her.

If she hadn’t been sending him mixed signals already, she’s really not sure what he’s going to make of this. She only hopes he still answers. 

She hides her phone under a pillow on the couch and gets up to heat herself up something for dinner. She thinks she might have a frozen pizza she can pop in the oven. Making the pizza, and being sure to set the timer so she doesn’t burn it this time, should distract her from the fact that Scott probably isn’t likely to text her back for at least 20 minutes. 

So she makes her pizza, sipping a glass of wine at her kitchen island while flipping through an old  _ House and Home _ magazine, pretending her heart isn’t pounding out of her chest at the thought of Scott, her neighbour, a guest on her podcast, team Canada sports psychologists, former junior champion ice dancer and definitely the guy she is really, really in to, receiving her progressively more embarrassing messages. All the while she keeps glancing over at the living room where her phone is tucked under the pale blue throw pillow. She eats her pizza painfully slow while continuing to sip her wine before finally heading into the living room again to retrieve her phone that has been taunting her this entire time. 

She’s surprised to find a message from him (and one from Jordan, probably about the supposed  _ heart eyes  _ in the promotional video). She sucks in a sharp breath before opening it. 

**_I think i’ll skip wearing my leafs jersey to an oilers game this time but uh it’s good to know that you’d be there. you know to take care of me if I’m too intense a fan for someone_ **

Oh. 

**_I’m here for whatever you need,_ ** she types and texts before she’s actually thought it through and she can’t take it back.  **_I mean like if you need help with anything._ ** Not helping herself. She thinks maybe she ought to call Jeff or Jordan in for advice but then she’d never hear the end of it. She isn’t which is worse though: floundering trying to text Scott or having either Jeff or Jordan’s constant commentary on how much she  _ does  _ in fact like him? 

But then he responds and it isn’t what she thought he’d say. It’s so much better and she almost spills over text that she might be completely irreversibly falling for him.

**_Same for me T_ ** ,  **_whatever you need I’m here for you too._ **

She reads it three times. Focusing and refocusing on the words, each time a different part jumps out at her in significance. The use of his nickname for her, T, fit in so perfectly like he’s been using it forever. Then it’s “whatever you need,” and there is a lot she thinks she needs from him — like his hands on her body, mapping her curves, his lips on hers, and him… just him. And then there’s “I’m here for you” and she can almost hear it, a soft whisper in her ear, how he’d say it so gentle and earnest. God, she’s in so far over her head. 

She can’t tell him over text, or over the phone that she thinks she’s fallen for him, and fallen for him hard. She can’t just apologize for Saturday and tell him everything she’d wanted to do with him then, on his couch, but was too scared to in the moment. It’s been so long since she’s been in a relationship and it seems so scary. Especially with him, only because she doesn’t want to mess it up. She’s only just met Scott this month and already he’s wormed his way right into her heart and she can’t imagine her life without him in it. 

She resolves that she has to do something about her feelings, and do it soon. So she texts back a simple  **_thanks_ ** and confirms he’s home Wednesday in the early evening. Wednesday. 

They spend the rest of Monday evening and then into Tuesday texting back and forth. Easy conversation, maybe bordering on flirtatious, but nothing to give away how she’s really feeling. That, she thinks, has to be said in person. 

She means to just text him Wednesday when he gets in to ask if he’d like to come over for tea to unwind from his flight or maybe have lunch on Thursday. But when Wednesday rolls around she’s on edge, like her body is itching to see him again, to be in his presence. Maybe waiting until the podcast was out, trying to contain her feelings until then ruined her in a way. Because now they’re spilling over, she can’t contain them. 

She hasn’t been able to stop thinking of him these past few days. Picturing his soft smile, the one that she feels like is just for her, or thinking about how easy she finds it to talk to him, to open herself up and talk about her injury, her life, how easy it is to laugh with him, how easily he makes her laugh. And making him laugh? That has to be the best thing. 

Then she thinks about holding his hand, how firm and comforting it felt in hers, how amazing she thinks his hands would feel roaming all over her body. Then she thinks of Saturday, thinks about him leaning in to press his lips to hers and how much she’d wanted it. It was that want that scared her she thinks. She’s never wanted anyone that badly before in her life. She realizes now that the podcast was more or less an excuse. 

Now she knows exactly how much and in what ways she wants him. She feels like she needs him in her life and he needs to know.

She hears him sometime between six and seven. She can hear the wheels of his suitcase against the tile floor of his entryway and then there’s some banging around, presumably while he puts things away, or maybe he’s getting himself a snack. The flight from Alberta to Ontario isn’t long enough for in-flight meals, but he would have been either in airports or in an airplane at both lunch and dinner time. 

She really should just text him, now that he’s home. But she can’t seem to formulate the right words.  **_We should have lunch_ ** doesn’t convey what she needs it to and  **_I think I’m falling in love with you and haven’t stopped thinking about you since we met_ ** is arguably way too much. So, instead of texting him, she apparently leaves her rational brain — the part of her in a constant state of worry, overthinking every detail of every action — inside her apartment and marches over to his. 

She doesn’t even give him time to say hello after she knocks and he opens the door, standing there with an utterly confused look on his face. She just gives him a once-over and pushes herself up on her toes and then she’s slotted her lips against his and she’s kissing him. Her lips against his is everything she thought it would be and more. He’s shocked for only a moment before reacting, his hands finding her waist and pulling her into him. 


	9. the (changed) relationship

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When we first set out to write this tale of wifi woes and baseball bat-wielding neighbours we intended to write something we could knock out in a couple of days (and was, say, 8k long). That, of course, went completely according to plan. Seven months and 50k later... here’s the end of our meet-cute one shot. (This chapter is actually roughly 8k, so there’s some poetic irony in that.)
> 
> As always, all our thanks goes to the inimitable only_because3, whose edits and encouragement have saved this story so many times and whose comments have made us laugh and find motivation. Thanks also to everyone who read, reviewed and kudos’ed — you kept us going over the course of the many (sorry!) months it took us to write this.
> 
> From awakeanddreaming: In July, we said we could probably finish this by the end of the weekend. More than half a year later, here we are at the end of the road. K, I loved being the Tessa to your Scott ;) and creating these wonderful iterations of T and S with you. I’m so glad you indulged me in having Tessa be a podcast host just because I love her voice when she talks. Thank you everyone for reading and for all your positive comments! I can’t wait for where the next road leads.
> 
> From bucketofrice: Writing this was a joy, and getting to inhabit wifi Scooter for nine chapters was so much fun. A, thank you for putting up with all my delays in this process and all the commas. Getting to write with you was a wholly new experience, but I couldn’t have asked for a better metaphorical Tessa to my metaphorical Scott, and I’m so excited for what we come up with next! <3

Scott feels like he only just got back to his apartment half a minute ago, barely had time to dump his bags and coat and rummage around his fridge for something remotely edible to tide him over until he goes grocery shopping tomorrow, when there’s a knock on his door and he groans.

It’s probably Mrs. Johnson again. She has some sort of weird sixth sense for when he goes on work trips and then returns again, because she’s usually at his door within the hour to make sure his flight was alright and that he got home safe.

He doesn’t have the heart to remind her he’s a grown man and perfectly fine and really, of the two of them,  _ she’s _ the one who should be worried about safe travelling at her age, but that’s not something he can tell her because it’s not nice, so he opens the door, ready to reassure her and — 

Finds Tessa on the other side, unannounced, looking quite determined.

_ What? _

He’s momentarily stunned, because she’s the last person he expected on his doorstep at nine on a Tuesday night and he’s about to ask her if she’s alright, because surely something bad must’ve happened for her to show up like this, but he doesn’t get the chance to. Doesn’t get the chance because she’s pushed herself up on her tiptoes and slotted her lips against his and his mind has gone delightfully blank all of a sudden.

Once again,  _ what? _

Later, much later, Scott will think back to this moment and thank his baser urges and quick reflexes because they’re the only thing stopping him from careening backwards into his hallway right about now, taking Tessa with him and ending with both of them in a heap on the hardwood floor. But if years of skating with a partner have taught him anything, it’s how to stay upright and hold on, no matter the circumstances.

So now, his body does just that, instinctively wrapping an arm around Tessa’s waist to pull her close and making his lips move against hers while his brain remains on holiday somewhere near Timbuktu.

They stumble backward into his entryway, their legs working seemingly of their own accord, and Scott is vaguely aware of Tessa’s foot lifting up and pushing on the door until it falls shut with a soft  _ click. _ Then it’s back to the feeling of her warm lips on his mouth and her body pressed up against his and it’s like someone set fire to every nerve ending in his skin and he’s suddenly forgotten how to breathe.

It’s the feeling of something solid against his back — the wall, his addled brain helpfully supplies — that manages to shock him slightly out of his blissful stupor, but instead of breaking the kiss and asking any of the myriad situationally appropriate questions, he uses his newfound level of consciousness to thread one hand into Tessa’s hair and the other to haul her closer against him.

The idea proves to have been a good one, if her breathy sigh is anything to go by, and Scott instinctively files it away as what is sure to become one of his new favourite sounds. Tessa, not one to let this whole endeavour remain a one-sided affair, licks into his mouth and makes his whole body shudder.

_ Fuck. _

Scott realizes, once she reaches down to his lower back and hovers there with her hand, silently asking for permission to move lower, that this is something that’s actually happening. 

_ This _ being Tessa Virtue, in his apartment, kissing him senseless. Well then. (Currently, he’s a bit unclear about whether or not he’s  _ actually _ kissing her or he’s spontaneously ascended to a higher plane of existence — he really hopes it’s the former — but still, it’s fucking incredible either way.)

It would be much easier to deal with if this weren’t the manifestation of pretty much all his dreams from the past two weeks: Tessa, pressed up against him, Tessa, with her hand scratching his scalp, Tessa, kissing her way down his neck. But it is, and it’s glorious, and he wants it to go on forever, but he’s also so damn  _ confused _ and his brain is finally turning back on again.

Because the last time he saw Tessa, she bolted for the bathroom and then kissed him on the cheek and then he left for Alberta and they never mentioned either of those things ever again. Except for… well, except for the fact that he could have  _ sworn _ she spent the entirety of the conference sending him flirty texts, and he — too shocked to really comprehend what was going on — had responded in kind. 

(One night, in the hotel bar after a couple of beers and a whisky, neat, he’d showed Chiddy the thread and asked if all girls were this confusing.

His best friend had snorted on a sip of his gin and tonic and clapped a hand on his back. “What do you think?” he’d said, a laugh threatening to escape his lips, and that had been that.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is this: Scott is equal parts delighted and gleeful and absolutely, horribly confused and now that his mind is catching up to his body, it’s starting to ask questions — a lot of them.

He curses his brain for recovering from its mush state (because now he has to, hopefully only briefly, stop kissing Tessa and there’s nothing he wants less, not even for the Leafs to lose the Stanley Cup for all eternity) and closes his eyes for a second. Here goes nothing.

“Listen, Tess," he says, gently pulling away from her and placing his hands on her shoulders. His breathing is laboured and his heart is hammering in his ears and he's got absolutely no clue how he ended up in this situation, backed into his entryway wall and panting. "I love this,” he finally stammers out, gesturing helplessly between and around them in a hopefully all-encompassing manner, “and I don’t want to stop… but what the  _ fuck _ is happening right now?”

He must look absolutely crazy in this state — hair mussed, face flushed, eyes blown wide and breath hot and heavy on her skin — but he needs  _ answers,  _ lest this all become some sort of sick joke and he find his rapidly beating heart shredded to pieces.

Tessa is gazing at him with equally wide eyes and he takes a little bit of comfort in the fact that she looks about as flustered as he feels right now. (It’s pretty damn flustered, he’ll assure you.)

His question seems to have switched  _ her _ brain on too, because suddenly she’s looking at him like she’s just now realizing where they are and what state they’re in and she can’t quite believe herself or what she’s done. Honestly, he can’t quite believe her either. 

“I—” she starts, and then immediately stops herself. She glances at his hands on her shoulders and seems to shiver under his touch. He doesn’t know what to make of it. “I, uh, the podcast. It came out on Monday.”

He’s so lost right now. “Yeah, you told me?” Tessa takes a half-step backwards and Scott’s hands fall limply at his sides. He raises one of them and scratches at the back of his head, unsure of what to do next. “I haven’t had a chance to listen yet, but I’m sure you did a great job, Tess…”

“No!” She startles at the volume of her own voice, before shaking her head and blushing again. “I mean, thank you, but no, that’s not it. It’s…” She’s clearly struggling through this and Scott wants nothing more than to reach out and hug her but he’s afraid of what’s coming next and of the very faint possibility of her vanishing into thin air if he touches her, like an apparition.

“It’s just that,” and here her voice becomes very soft and she looks down at her slipper-clad feet, “the podcast is out which means you’re not my source anymore which means I can finally kiss you.”

_ Oh. _

“Oh,” he says, dumbly. “Okay.”

Tessa must sense that he’s at a loss for words right now, because she rattles on, as much to explain as to fill the space between them. “I, uh, well,” she says, “I might have been wanting to kiss you since the interview, but, uh, ethics and all that, and I didn’t know how to bring it up so I didn’t and now I realize I must have been acting really weird over the past two weeks and I’m sorry about that and I hope it was okay that I kissed you, and didn’t like, warn you or anything but—”

It’s at this point that Scott takes a step forward with a grin on his face that he hadn’t noticed beginning to spread when she started rambling (it’s one of the most adorable things he thinks he’s ever seen), cups the back of her head and pulls her in for another kiss. It’s soft and sweet and she tastes like sunshine. “It was  _ very _ okay,” he murmurs between kisses, delighting at how she goes soft and pliant under his touch. “I’m glad you did. Kiss me, I mean.”

Tessa pulls back, and there’s a small smile on her face now. “Good.”

Now that his brain is working again, the questions start piling up like cars trying to exit a highway during rush hour. The first one that makes it to the off ramp is: “Why didn’t you  _ say _ anything?”

Tessa blushes at that, and Scott runs a comforting thumb over her cheekbone. “If kissing you while you’re a source was unethical, wanting to kiss you and telling you that seemed to be wrong too, somehow.” He doesn’t quite see through her logic but it doesn’t really matter, now that they’re here. “I know it doesn’t make any sense but I just… I tried so hard to ignore it and push it down and tell myself that I wasn’t allowed to have any of those thoughts for two weeks at all.” 

“The whole two weeks, eh?” He’s grinning again, because he can’t help himself. She’s been wanting to kiss him for  _ two weeks _ and now she finally can. (And he can kiss her back. It’s wonderful.)

Tessa lets out a little giggle and then immediately turns a deeper shade of crimson. It’s the most endearing thing Scott has ever seen. “Well,” she says, having regained some of her confidence as she pretends to mull over her words, “two weeks, not counting the time I had to assess whether or not you were a serial killer and I was a ghost.”

She looks so proud of her quip and Scott can’t help but laugh as he pulls her close and hugs her tight. When he buries his face in the crook of her neck and gets a lungful of vanilla and strawberry and  _ Tessa,  _ it feels a little bit like coming home.

“I’m very glad that you’re not a ghost,” he says with all the sincerity he can muster. 

Tessa holds on a little tighter. “Me too.”

They stand there for a little while, just holding one another, until Scott remembers that up until a few minutes ago they were engaged in a much more…  _ pleasurable _ activity. One that they might return to. He gently loosens their embrace so he can look at her, really see the way her hair has come loose from the bun she put it in, how her lips are tinged raspberry-red and swollen from earlier. 

How he wants to tangle his hands in said hair and press his mouth to said lips, as soon as humanly possible.

So, with as much swagger as he can possibly muster (and in his punch-drunk state, it’s probably not all that much) he cocks his head to the side. “I think I rudely interrupted you before,” he says, voice low, and Tessa arches a brow, “and it would only be fair to return to your original point.” At the confusion on her face, he elaborates. “The kissing, I mean. I wouldn’t mind some more kiss—” He cuts himself off. “It was great, really.”

Tessa snorts. “It wasn’t half-bad,” she quips, lips quirking up in a self-satisfied smile, and oh, he wants to wipe the smirk right off her face. He settles for kissing it off, instead, hard and deep as he pulls her close again.

* * *

He wants to kiss her too. He  _ wants _ her. This is really the only thought she has when he pulls her back into him and continues where they left off. His lips are firm against hers, hungry for her and she’s melting, feeling boneless in his arms. His hands, gripping her hips, holding her against him as she leans her weight into him, are the only things keeping her upright. She hasn’t been kissed like this in a really long time, she doesn’t know if she’s been kissed like  _ this —  _ like Scott is kissing her now, like he wants to know every part of her — ever. 

She never wants it to stop. 

As she kisses him back, slips her tongue between the seam of his lips, she wonders how on earth she waited this long to kiss him. Though at the same time she is so very, very glad she waited. She knows she wouldn’t have been able to remain professional when editing and producing the podcast if she’d kissed him beforehand. She doesn’t know if she’d have even been able to pull herself away from him long enough to work on it at all. His body feels so good, so right, pressed against hers. It feels so wonderfully new, yet like they’ve moved together like this -- their bodies working as one -- forever.

They fit together, she thinks, like they’ve always meant to be here in this moment. And she wants more, wants everything. She feels the warmth of her desire for him pooling low in her belly. God, she wants him. She’s never wanted anyone with such conviction before. How can they have known each other for such a short period of time and want each other this much. 

Her hands rove over his chest, one hand slipping under his shirt to feel the smooth ridges of his muscles, just the tips of her fingers tracing delicately over his skin and she feels him shudder. The other hand fists the material of his shirt, desperately trying to cling on to something. She wants it off him. Needs to get it off. Hers too. She wants to feel the closeness of his skin against hers. She’s never felt such urgent desire, such a deep-seated need to be with another person before, not like she does for him right now. She wants,  _ needs, _ his lips, his hands all over her body. She needs to feel how he would move inside her, like a missing puzzle piece slotting into place, making her feel whole, complete and oh so full. Her body aches to know his. 

It’s ridiculous because they haven’t even been on a real date. Yet, she feels like she knows him, has known him for so, so much longer than just a few weeks. She wants this with him so very much, feels like she’s been waiting a lifetime for this moment. 

Reluctantly she pulls her lips off his, already mourning the contact, but she needs him out of his shirt already. She’s tugging at it a little bit uselessly and he laughs, resting his forehead against hers, she feels his laugh puff out across her face. His hands move from her hips, gliding up her sides, to her shoulders and down her arms to find her hands. 

“Are you trying to undress me, Virtch?” She can still hear the laugh in his voice and when she chances to look up at him she sees what she can only describe as pure happiness on his face. His smile radiates joy and honestly makes her feel a bit weak in the knees.

“Yes,” she says a little breathless, kissing under his jaw and down his neck. “Please.” 

He’s laughing again, but then his hands are leaving hers, finding the hem of his own t-shirt and swiftly pulling it over his own head and throwing it somewhere down the hall. She doesn’t care enough to look where it lands. “Better?” he asks.

She hums out her answering  _ yeah _ with her lips pressed to his sternum. His skin is warm under her lips, and she can feel his moan rumble deep in his chest against her lips as she kisses right over his heart. He counts the vertebrae up her spine with the tips of his fingers, dipping under her shirt as she kisses her way back up to his lips. 

Her kiss is more sloppy this time, more urgent as she smooths her palms over his bare skin and feels him shiver beneath her touch. His hands are still under her shirt, tracing her ribs. “Take it off,” she says against his lips. “My shirt, take it off.”

“ _ Tess,”  _ her name comes out as a hiss, breathed out on an exhale as he pulls away to look at her, lips red and swollen from kissing her. There’s a look of questioning in his eyes. Of course there is. He’s Scott and he’s god damn perfect. His eyes flirt around her face, reading her, making sure she really wants what she’s asking for. Checking in. He’s also probably still suffering a bit of whiplash from her from earlier, so she understands any hesitation he may have to be sure she wants this. 

“Scott,” she says and his name comes out sounding like a plea. “I need you to touch me.” 

He looks at her a moment longer and seems to be satisfied with the answer he finds written in her expression because he wastes no time with her shirt after that. Then his hands are everywhere. 

They kiss like that for a while, and the only thing between their bare chests is the thin, lacy material of her bralette. Then his hand migrates up her body until his hand grazes the underside of her breast and she sucks in a sharp breath. Tessa feels his responding smile against her lips before he runs his thumb across her nipple and she gasps into his mouth. She rolls her hips into his and feels how he’s straining in his jeans for her. She rolls her hips again until he matches her gasp and his thumb dips under the material of her bra. Then he’s trailing kisses down her neck, across her collarbone, down the flat of her sternum, nuzzling the lace out of the way until his mouth is latching on to her left nipple, tongue matching the rhythm of his thumb circling her right. 

If she weren’t already mindless just from kissing him, she would certainly be now. Her breathing is ragged already and she can feel herself clenching around nothing, her underwear already soaked. She doesn’t want to wait any longer. She wants him and she’s wondering why either of them is still wearing pants. 

“Take me to your bed,” she pants against his shoulder. “Or your couch... or something. Please.” She’s hardly even aware of what she’s saying any more. She just knows she wants him and as desperate as she is, she doesn’t want to fuck him against the wall of his entryway. Not the first time anyway. 

He pulls his mouth from her nipple with a wet pop and looks up at her. His pupils are blown, his eyes are so dark, his lips swollen and he looks about as gone as she feels. But then he’s blinking at her, taking a moment to come back to himself while he studies her. 

“Are you sure, T?” he asks, his voice is wrecked but gentle. “This is what you want?” 

She’s nodding before she can find her words. She wants. And she’s knows she’s ready. She might not have been ready last weekend for what she knew would culminate in them sharing a kiss but she is very ready now. She doesn’t know if she’s ever wanted anything more. 

She also knows, can read it in his face, can feel it in her soul that if she were to say no, he’d be perfectly content to go no further tonight. But she can feel he wants more too. Wants everything with her. “Please. I want you.” 

That seems to be all he needs. He starts kissing her again, but this time backing her down the hall towards where she knows his bedroom is. He only stops kissing her as they round the corner and she struggles to concentrate on walking backwards with his lips on her. He stops at his bedroom door pushing it open before scooping her up in his arms to carry her to his bed. She can’t help but giggle when he tosses her down on the mattress. And he stares at her with what can only be considered reverence. Then his eyes widen. 

“Shit,” he says, and she quirks an eyebrow at him. “I’ll be right back,” he rushes before ducking out of the room towards the bathroom and she thinks she understands. 

He comes back looking a bit sheepish with a few condoms held in his hand. He shrugs and offers a shy smile but then begins to look at her nervously. She assumes he’s worrying he’s being presumptuous now, so she reassures him that, yes, this is what she wants. “Good plan,” she says, undoing her bra and shrugging the straps off her shoulders, just to make sure her intent is crystal clear. 

It is. He tosses the condoms on the bed, easily within reach once they’re ready and breathes out heavily as he approaches where she’s reclined on his bed. “Fuck,” he manages, as he climbs onto the bed leaning over her and bracketing her body with his hands on either side of her. “You are so gorgeous.” 

“So are you,” she says before she thinks it through, her cheeks pinking a bit, but before she can get truly self conscious his lips are on her skin again. 

He kisses down her naked chest, stopping only briefly to circle his tongue around each nipple before continuing down her stomach, stopping again at her belly button ring. He flicks his tongue over the piercing and she shivers, her whole body tensing with anticipation. He does it again and she can’t help but buck her hips. He chuckles against her skin and she squirms because his breath against her damp skin tickles and sets her alight all at the same time. 

He grabs her hips to hold her steady his thumbs dipping under the waistband of her leggings. “Can I take these off?” he husks.

“Please,” is all she can manage and he’s already getting to work peeling off the offending garment. She helps only as much as lifting her hips off the mattress when he gets them to her ass. Then with one firm tug he’s gotten them off, and her socks and the slippers she forgot she’d been wearing get pulled off with them. 

She’s left in nothing but a simple cotton thong and even though she should feel exposed, vulnerable, she doesn’t. Not with him. 

“So gorgeous,” he whispers, tracing the line of her thong with just the tip of a finger. He follows the elastic of the waistband first, then down around her hip in towards her centre until he reaches the skin of her lips and his feather light touch has her shivering. Then, as he presses a little firmer, running his finger through her wetness, she thinks she hears him curse under his breath, but she’s too consumed by his touch to know for sure. He moves her underwear to the side and starts circling her opening with his finger. 

“Is this okay?” he asks, pushing just the tip of his finger inside her. She nods and slowly he pushes it the rest of the way in and she’s gasping. He smiles and kisses her stomach, then just above her thong before moving down to kiss her clit through her underwear and she nearly comes just from that. She bucks her hips again and then he’s licking her through the material and gently thrusting his finger inside her three times before he adds a second and she’s melting into the mattress. He keeps working her with his fingers crooked upwards hitting just the right spot and with his mouth until she’s falling apart around him. She comes with a shout and a tremor in her thighs. He lays a gentle kiss on her hip as she comes down. 

Then she’s pulling herself up the bed on shaky arms, barely managing to take off her absolutely ruined underwear before collapsing back onto the mattress. She lifts her head a fraction and looks at him, sees how he’s straining in his pants. “Take them off,” she says. Her voice is quiet, blissed out but both firmer and huskier than she expected. “Take off your pants please,” she says on a breath. 

He nods as he works the belt of his jeans with trembling fingers and she wants to help, she really does. She wants to be the one to peel them off his body but she’s also still shaking from the aftermath of her orgasm, still catching her breath as she lays back in the bed and she needs them off him now. 

And then he’s naked, and god is he beautiful. She can’t look away as he crawls back up the bed towards her. 

She can’t help but reach out and take him in her hand and smirk at the sharp breath he takes when her fingers wrap around him. Tessa strokes him a few times, running the pad of her thumb over the head of his cock before he’s reaching between them to hold her wrist and still her movement. 

“If you want me to last,” he breathes out. “You’re going to need to stop that.” 

She smiles at him and flutters her lashes at him, pumping him twice more before letting go. “Then you better get one of those condoms on,” she says. And she’s never been this demanding during sex before, but god she wants him. She needs him inside her like two minutes ago. 

Once he’s torn the foil wrapper and rolled the condom over himself, he lines himself up in the cradle if her hips. 

She feels him press against her cunt but he stops, watching her face for a moment first. “Tess,” he says. “You’re sure?” he’s checking in again and it’s endearing but she wants him in her now. She rolls her hips in response, but he stills them with a hand. “I know… uh your sister mentioned it had been a while for you and I wanted to make sure that this is really what you want… I want you to be okay with everything.” 

He is such a sweet man to be so caring and considerate but she definitely doesn’t want any mention of her sister when she is so so close to having sex with Scott. “I want you,” is what she says in response. “I want you.” 

He’s nodding and shifting above her but then he looks serious for a moment, brow furrowing. “I want you too Tess. So much but, um, just…I realized that maybe I was presuming before and... I want to be clear before we do this… when you say you want me, do you mean just sex or?” 

“I mean or.” She smiles at him, at his wide eyes and mussed hair and nervous gaze. “I mean everything. I want everything with you.” 

He’s nodding again. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. So do you want to go on a date with me then?” When she glares at him and bucks her hips he laughs. “Tomorrow? I mean, do you want to go on a date with me tomorrow?”

“Yes, in case it wasn’t glaringly obvious, I want to go on a date with you,” she grits out, exasperation colouring her tone. “But first, I want this.” She pulls him inside her with her legs wrapped around his hips and his ensuing  _ okay  _ gets swallowed in a kiss.

* * *

Scott hasn’t felt this blissed-out in  _ years. _ Or, well, ever, really.

Lying next to Tessa, with her head tucked into the crook of his shoulder as sweat cools on both their bodies, must be the closest thing to heaven he’s ever felt. He wouldn’t mind staying in their little bubble forever.

He starts tracing patterns across her back with his fingers, mapping out the constellations in her freckles. She shivers when he glides over her shoulder blade and turns her head so she can look at him. 

Her hair is fanned out over the pillow and his shoulder, like a mahogany halo and he lets his eyes track over her form, drinking her in. Whatever did he do to deserve this — lying in bed with this woman, kissing her, holding her?

Tessa smiles and presses a kiss to his pec and he shudders at the contact. “That was—” she starts, and then stops, letting out a chuckle. “Well.”

“Yeah,” he says, grinning too. It was better than he’d dared imagine. (And now, cocooned together in his bed, he’s finally willing to admit to himself that he did imagine, quite a lot.)

“I’m really glad you agreed to be on my podcast,” she says, and Scott lets out a laugh.

“I would say I’m really glad you dropped a pan on your foot, but that might be a little mean.” Tessa gives him a shove at that, and he yelps in mock-pain. “I guess I deserved that,” he says, rubbing at the part of his chest she hit with her elbow.

“You’re not the one who was labelled a ghost,” she says, faux outrage in her tone, and she raises an eyebrow as if to challenge him.

He laughs. “I will apologize for that until the day I die,” he says, as solemnly as he can muster. “And I think earlier proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are  _ very  _ much alive.”

He rolls over on his side so they’re facing one another, close enough for him to feel her breath on his skin. His eyes trace from hers to her nose to her lips, flitting to and fro between the freckles that litter her face. They’re like little drops of sunshine on her skin.

Tessa blushes under his gaze, and the pink is pretty dappling her cheeks. But as beautiful as she is to admire from a (admittedly very close) distance, she’s even prettier to him with her lips on his.

Scott cups her cheek in one hand and inches closer so his lips are just a hair’s breadth from hers. He closes the gap between them and feels Tessa press closer so their bodies are flush. Before had been hurried and frenzied, an overwhelming need for contact and heat and release. Now, they’re unhurried, taking the time to explore one another and just  _ feel. _

He cards his fingers through her hair, marvelling at the silkiness, and Tessa runs her foot up the back of his calf, making him shudder. When he rolls them over so he’s hovering above her, she arches up to meet him halfway.

“I’m so glad the damn podcast is out,” he manages in between laving at her collarbone. 

“Me too,” she says on a sigh, and then they don’t do much more talking for a good long while.

Later, much later, she’s perched on a barstool in his kitchen, her leggings and shirt back on (a shame, he thinks), and her hair tied up in some impossible bun. Her stomach had started growling a bit ago and she’d flushed crimson at the sound it had emitted. Scott, on the other hand, thought it was one of the most endearing things in the world.

Now they’re in his kitchen and he’s staring into a near-empty refrigerator, wondering what the hell he can offer her to eat.

“There’s, uh, half a loaf of bread, some milk that went bad…” he grabs the carton to check, “…yesterday, and pickles?”

Tessa snorts.

Scott turns around, a sheepish look on his face. He’d dutifully cleared out most of his fridge before he left for Alberta and now he really, really needs to go to the store. 

“I might know a place,” she says, a smirk on her lips, “pretty close to here, with some pasta that we could cook and some sauce.”

It takes him a second until it clicks… and then he’s playing right along.

“How close?”

“Well—” she pauses, as if to think “—maybe fifteen seconds, tops.”

Scott pretends to check a watch he’s not wearing. “We should be able to make that if we leave right away.”

“Mhmm, last I heard there’s no traffic at all.”

He bursts out laughing and she does too and he’s struck once again by how easy this is — being with Tessa, in whatever way they choose. In many ways, it feels like he’s known her two decades, not two weeks; in other ways he’s learning new pieces of her every minute.

It’s comforting and exhilarating all at once and he’s soaking up any bit of knowledge he can. Right now, it’s the way her eyes crinkle when she laughs, a real honker that makes her nose wrinkle and her head fall back. He’s determined to make her laugh like that as much as he possibly can.

“So,” she says, when she’s calmed down a bit, “pasta?”

He grins. “I’d love some.”

Scott grabs his phone and keys and a sweatshirt and follows Tessa to her apartment. True to her estimation, the walk takes about twelve seconds flat and he’s incredibly glad once again that they’re next door neighbours. At the very least, it saves them a lot of awkward discussions about whose place is closer to wherever they are. But, Scott secretly hopes that living next door might make it easier for one of them to spend the night.

_ Danger, Will Robinson, _ his brain shouts, because he just leapt forward about fifty steps and he should probably rein it in just a little bit until he and Tessa have mutually agreed upon their expectations for what this thing between them really is.

(It’s a date, at the very least, because that’s the one thing they’d managed to agree upon before she all but yanked him inside of her and he lost the power of coherent thought for a while. But beyond that? Beyond that is the great unknown.)

He follows Tessa into her kitchen and it’s much less awkward than the first time, when he was here for the interview. Now, he knows his hair is a mess and his sweats are crooked on his hips but he couldn’t care less because it’s Tessa’s hands that ran through the strands and Tessa’s nimble fingers that pulled the fabric off his legs. It’s Tessa who made him come undone and it’s Tessa who’s currently standing in her kitchen, head quirked to the side with a box of pasta in her hands.

“Earth to Scott,” she says, and his head snaps over toward where she’s standing. She’s a vision in black cotton and flushed cheeks and he can’t help but rake his eyes up and down her frame. “You alright?”

“Yeah, sorry,” he manages, “got a bit in my head for a minute there.”

She laughs and shakes her head before placing the pasta on the counter and grabbing a pot from her cupboard. “Be glad I have pasta,” she says as she fills it with water, “otherwise we’d be headed straight for culinary disaster.”

Scott laughs. “Not in your element in the kitchen?”

“Unless it’s poached eggs on toast?” Tessa turns around to face him while the water heats up on the stove. “Not really.”

“Well, Virtch, we can change that, you know.”

“Really?” 

“Mhmm,” he says, taking a few steps forward so he’s in her space, “I can share some of my wisdom.”

Tessa lets out a snort. “You’re welcome to try.”

“Challenge accepted, T,” he says, “but first—”

He cups the back of her skull and pulls her in for a kiss, unable to resist her any longer. Now that he’s had a taste of Tessa, he can’t get enough. Tessa responds with equal enthusiasm, snaking a hand around his waist and settling on his lower back, pressing them closer together.

She sighs into the kiss, pushing herself up on her tiptoes to get a better angle. Scott thinks he’s sure he’ll never tire of this feeling, not until the day he dies. They fit together perfectly, like they were meant to be, like two puzzle pieces that met their match. 

(He’s wondered before, if his skating and Tessa’s dancing would have worked together just as well. He’s sure there’s a universe somewhere where they move across the ice as one.)

Eventually, they pull apart, breathing heavily. 

“Uh, pasta,” he finally manages, and Tessa nods and reaches to grab the box just as he makes a move for it too. They knock it over in the process and both let out bursts of breathy laughter. 

“Let me—”

“I’ll get—”

“I’m closer anyway,” he says, and pours half the box into the boiling water, after which he adds some salt from the container next to the cooktop (he noticed she didn’t put any in before).

“Thanks.” She’s got a sheepish grin on her face, and she gestures at the pot. “Is that lesson one of Moir’s cooking school? Always salt your pasta water?” 

Scott laughs. “Yeah. Always salt your cooking water, always keep an eye on your pots so they don’t boil over and…” he holds out a hand to her, which she takes, and pulls her close again “… always kiss the chef.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound too difficult.”

And if Tessa Virtue is one thing, it’s a quick study.

* * *

_ Several months later…  _

“T, babe, where should I put this box of electronics stuff?” Scott’s voice rings out from the front entryway, carrying through the entire apartment. 

Tessa leans her head out into the hallway from the bedroom, where she’s been sorting and putting away the last of Scott’s clothes into the closet and the dresser. 

She swears she isn’t trying to get rid of his clothes, because she loves him and if something has sentimental value to him then they will hold on to it as long as he needs to, but one man can only wear so many Team Canada or Maple Leafs or  _ Tess, I got this shirt on sale when I was seventeen, it only cost $5 and look how well it’s held up  _ t-shirts. She has a small pile built up on the bed of articles of clothing she’s never seen him wear — mainly things that are worse for wear that were buried deep in his closet. The rest she’s folded and put in his side of the long white dresser that runs the length of the wall across from the bed. She’s already set up the rest of the things from Scott’s old bedroom; the photo with his granddad that he kept on his bedside table is on display on the dresser. 

Then, there’s the painting he got when he was Montreal a few years ago for a training session — of a dancer in a red dress being held up by her partner in black, tight in his arms. She hung it above the dresser; she even got a red and a black throw pillows for the chair in the corner to compliment the colours. 

She’d noticed the painting the first time she spent the night in his bedroom and fell in love with it immediately: the way the direction of the painter’s brush strokes had created the illusion of movement in the dancer’s red dress, the way the the partner’s hands dug into to her bare back, like he was holding his life in his hands. 

To her, the painting is love. It’s passion. It’s dance. 

She’s glad they made a home for it here in their room. He told her when they were moving it that he doesn’t know why he bought it, that it just caught his eye and he got it on impulse. “Maybe it was always meant to be for you,” he’d said, smiling at her, looking all dopey, his voice sounding dreamy and far away, yet full of truth, like he really believed what he was saying. She couldn’t help but kiss him then. “A dancer for my dancer.” He’d run a thumb over her cheek and given her one last kiss before heading back for the next round of things.

She’s been in the bedroom ever since, while he’s been bringing over the final load of his things. Her hair is piled high on top of her head, though she’s contemplating pulling it out, the tight elastic and weight of her long hair starting to hurt. She’s wearing a tank top, (she pulled her sweater off after the third trip down the hall with Scott’s belongings) and rolled up her sweatpants, which might in fact be his. (She can’t be sure because she’s been wearing them for months and she can’t bring herself to care.) 

Scott’s voice startles her back into the present, and she looks at him and his box. “Hmm.” She bites her lip, thinking. “Bring it here, let me see what it is.” 

He walks down the hall with the box in his arms, and she shakes her head as he makes a show of pretending it's a huge hardship, struggling with the weight of his cargo. In reality, she knows it isn’t heavy at all; the box is not even full. “You’re really making me work here,” he says, and laughs. 

They’ve spent the better part of this morning bringing his things from next door into her apartment — _ their _ apartment, she mentally corrects herself, the thought causing a dopey smile to creep across her face. Most of his stuff they hadn’t even bothered to box up. 

His clothes (the ones that still remained in his closet that is) were carried over still on their hangers and hung right back up on what is now his side of the walk-in closet. The rest he had shoved in a duffle bag and tossed on the floor of the bedroom to deal with later — she knows he won’t which is why she’s been organizing it. 

Most of his furniture they’d sold or left for the new tenant — except for his reclaimed wood dining table, which Tessa loves. He and his brother made it a few summers ago, and now it’s replacing her old table and bringing some of Scott’s presence into her space. 

Deciding on the move was easy: Scott’s lease had been up and since they were spending most nights together anyway and half his wardrobe already lived in her bedroom. In the end, the decision that he officially move in was pretty easy to make, almost as painless as the move itself.

Nonetheless, he’s still complaining — for what she’s sure is at least the fifth time today. “It really would be so much easier if there were a door directly between our apartments so I didn’t have to lug everything through the hall.” 

“Oh, those fifteen paces between my door and yours are just so many; how are you even still standing?” she chides playfully, stepping out into the hall to meet him halfway. 

“When you make the trip about a hundred times in one day they are!” 

She snorts, her nose crinkling and her cheeks pushing up to her eyes. It definitely hasn’t been a hundred times, not unless he’s been carrying cutlery over piece by piece. She shakes her head before peering into the box he’s been carrying. 

“Scott, these are all just random cords!” Tessa sticks her hand into the box and pulls out a tangle of mismatched cords and wires. “Do you even know what half of these are for?” 

He pulls on one, extracting it from the mess. “Um, this one might be for my old GPS… see, it has that weird plug thingy for the car.” 

“And do you still use that GPS?” 

“Of course not, Tessa. What do I have Google Maps for?” 

Tessa is torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to shake her head and walk away. “How about you bring this to the living room and set up your fancy SmartTV and the blu-ray and all that and if you don’t need any of these cords for that maybe they can go with the rest of the donations… You never know, maybe there’s someone else looking for the weird cord thingy for a GPS from 2008.” 

She does in fact decide to laugh when she’s done, because he’s adorable and such a  _ guy _ sometimes, before kissing his cheek and turning to head back to the bedroom. 

Transferring the box to one hand, he gently grabs onto her wrist with his free hand and pulls her towards him. He kisses her again, deeper this time, and he lets himself linger. “Didn’t you know that random cords were what I’m really bringing to this cohabitation? You never know when we may need them.” He pulls three braided cords with coloured ends out from the nest. “This, I believe, was for an old VCR... what if we found one at a yard sale and it didn’t come with cords?” 

“Oh, well in that case, I’m sure we’d very much regret having given up this box.” She runs her fingers through his hair. It’s a bit sweaty but she doesn’t care. “But we can’t even contemplate getting a VCR if the fancy TV isn’t hooked up.”

Scott had just bought a SmartTV, and it’s quite a few years newer and quite a bit larger than the set she’d had previously. They’d gone out during the week to find the equipment to mount it properly on the wall across from the couch. She knows he’s been looking forward to getting it set up so that they can watch the game later on, drink beer, eat pizza and enjoy their first night of true cohabitation. “Yeah, yeah… I’m on it kiddo,” he says, leaning in for what should be a final kiss. 

“Love you.” 

“Love you too, T. So much.” That gets another kiss, before the box slips in his grip and really gets in the way of them getting too close. 

He finally heads to the living room to set up the TV and she heads back into what’s now  _ their  _ room to finish putting everything away. Once she’s done, she heads into the master bathroom to grab a quick shower, figuring Scott will take a little while re-familiarizing himself with the TV’s instruction manual. When she’s out of the shower and mostly dry, she throws on underwear and one of Scott’s old t-shirts that she’d left out on the bed before heading out to check on his progress.

He’s got everything physically set up (they installed most of the wall mount together earlier) and he’s just now starting it up to get all their steaming accounts going, which will require him to set up the wifi. 

“Tess,” he asks, calling out for her because he has yet to realize she’s standing a few feet away, watching him as he works. “What’s your wifi? I thought it was  _ fourbarres _ but I can’t find it. It keeps trying to get me to log in to  _ Leafs4Eva  _ but my password won’t work and I thought I’d called to cancel the service already?” 

“Try my password.” She takes a step closer to the couch and sees him jump a bit at the unexpected closeness of her voice. “It’s  _ pasdechat17 _ after my first cat.” 

“Tess?” His brow furrows, drawing together and wrinkling his forehead. 

She just shrugs and spells out the password for him as he selects each letter on the screen. When it successfully logs in he looks at her again in question. 

“I thought I’d do something to make you feel more at home…” She shrugs her shoulders. She wasn’t sure if changing her network name to his old one would be as sweet as she thought it was, or if he’d just find it a waste of time. But he’s smiling widely at her, his grin nearly splitting his face as he takes her in, wearing nothing but his t-shirt. 

“Welcome home, Scott,” she says, and leans up to press a kiss to his cheek.

**Author's Note:**

> You can yell at us in the comments, or find awakeanddreaming on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/awakeanddreami1) and bucketofrice on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/_bucketofrice) and [Tumblr](https://good-things-come-in-threes.tumblr.com/).


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